CSS – “Cascading Style Sheets” is a styling language used in the field of web design. A website without CSS looks like a skeleton. The contents of a web page are organized in HTML5. CSS applies on the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) elements to decorate the contents wrapped with HTML tags. This article is about the impact of style sheets of a website on the level of SEO – Search Engine Optimization. In other words, it describes how a website tends to be ranked in search engines with the help of CSS.
As many digital marketing consultants define, the CSS does not directly affect on SEO. But it has a slight affection with the subject of presenting the digital contents over the WWW – World Wide Web. The number of requests passed from the client node to the web server includes the number of linked CSS files of a website since for each and every external CSS file, a separate request is to be passed to the server. Number of requests to load a website from one user/ node should be reduced for a better optimisation. On the other hand the size of the stylesheets can be reduced by compressing them. CSS compressing tools are freely available in the Internet. The number of lines required to do something in CSS can also be reduced by optimizing the advanced front end programming techniques.
The style of a web page adds a significant value to its content as it causes to be attractive to the end users. It helps the visitors to focus their eye to the most important points in the content. CSS is the basement for the building blocks of a typical website which ensures the look and feel as per its PSD – Photoshop design file. UX Engineers are the IT professionals who write CSS codes in many IDEs – Integrated Development Environments. Some sort of CSS properties are not supported by all the browsers as expected. Therefore, the visitors coming from different web browsers may fail to see the whole web page as it is. To resolve such kind of issues regarding with the rendering of web sites, the front end developers follow CSS prefixes for fixing the browser incompatibilities. The browser specific CSS codes are written by the front end web developers.
SASS – “Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets” is an advanced application of CSS. SASS provides the facility to the frontend engineer to use important features that cannot be applied in pure CSS coding. LESS is also a valuable tool to be used for applying advanced techniques in CSS in a very simple manner. SASS or SCSS codes should be compiled to generate the CSS files that are linked to the website. Compilation can be done by using a compiler like PrePros or the online applications freely available. In addition to them, there is a method to compile such SASS files by using commands in the command prompt of the computer. Properly organized SASS coding styles provide the opportunity to apply some object oriented concepts like inheritance through the techniques such as nesting.
At eBlix Technologies, we always follow the web frontend coding standards as defined by the W3C – World Wide Web Consortium. The UI standards followed by eBlix designers are coincide with the latest user interface standards introduced in Mr. Jacob Nielsen’s official website: https://www.nngroup.com.
CSS has a significant effect on making a website SEO friendly. On the whole, the best way of writing CSS becomes the best way of optimising the CSS coding. It means that the optimized CSS codes will cause to bring the website to the first SERP – Search Engine Result Page. Finally, your website will be at the fingertips of the target audience with the effort of the team of professional web developers at eBlix Technologies – an Australian Web Development and Design Agency, based in Sri Lanka.
