Optimising Your CSS To Gain SEO Benefits

Hi,
There has been a lot of emphasis placed recently on improving the performance of websites by increasing the load time of pages and fairly recently, Google compounded this by incorporating this factor into their search engine algorithm. It should be noted that this is a relatively minor component of their algorithm but nevertheless if you have a well optimized, SEO-friendly website then everything helps and it may be the difference between yours and a competitors site when it comes to SERP (search engine ranking position).

The benefits of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) over conventional HTML to style your web pages is obviously well documented and by separating the page content from the formatting it makes your pages load faster, contain a higher content-code ratio and gives you much more control over the layout of your pages.

What is often overlooked by many web designers and SEO specialists is the actual size of these external style sheets and the effect that they can have on your overall page loading time. Optimizing your CSS can be completed via a three-stage process to significantly reduce the loading times of your sites web pages :

Stage 1: Use External CSS Style Sheets

Stage 2: Combine ALL External Style Sheets

Stage 3: Use a CSS Compression Program