CSS tricks & tips

As you probably know, HTML offers us many commands that can be used to alter the look and feel of a page. Headings, bold text, links, text that is bigger or smaller than the text around it and so on. Naturally, the search engines have noticed these features and adjusted their algorithms to match them. For example, a word in the heading of a page usually tells more about the contents of the page than a word in the body text of the same page, thus the search engines give more weight to words found in the heading than in the body text.

This creates some problems for the webmasters. For example, it's sometimes impossible to add a H1 size heading to a page without ruining its outer appearance. Every now and then, pleasing the search engine algorithm would require you to add a link to a page, but you really wouldn't want to encourage your visitors to leave your site.

These things are usually solved, if they are solved, by cloaking the page. The problem is that cloaking takes plenty of work and sometimes money. If there are only minor visual changes required in order to please both the search engines and the visitors, cloaking seems like a bit heavy solution for the problem.

Fortunately, as technology has developed, HTML has gotten an add-on: CSS scripting language. CSS is used to alter the visual representation of pages and as such is very useful in fooling the search engine spiders, especially when placed in a separate file and then called from the HTML. While search engines ignore these external CSS files, nearly all browsers support CSS to some degree. TheCounter.com's statistics for September 2001 showed that over 95% of their visitors used browsers supporting CSS at least to a some degree (IE3 or later, NN4 or later).

This means that by using CSS, you can currently offer somewhat different content to the search engines and the visitors. Although CSS does not offer the same amount of flexibility as cloaking (for example, the actual textual content of the page cannot be changed with CSS), it is well-suited for solving the small problems otherwise left unsolved.

You should however keep in mind that while an overwhelming majority of browsers support CSS, a lot of them don't support all of its features. To avoid nasty surprises, it is best to check your pages in both NN4 and IE4. As later versions of these browsers have better CSS support, you'll be safe if your tricks work in the 4's.

What can you do with CSS tricks?

CSS can be used to hide text, but since humans can still pretty easily find the hidden text even if hidden by CSS, I wouldn't recommend using it for this. It is way more useful in fooling the search engines to think some parts of your text are more important than they actually are. With it, you can create links that do not look like links to anyone else but the search engine spider, or H1 headings that look like your body text or smaller! Bold text that looks bold to the visitor, but not to the engines? The other way around? The possibilities are huge. By using CSS features, you can optimize your page without sacrificing too much of your site's outer appearance.

Notice that this thing is a potential danger. Like cloaking, using CSS to manipulate your page in order to rank higher on the search engines may get you into trouble. When used for normal purposes, there is no risk of getting punished by the search engines for using CSS. However, the CSS tips I'm going to give to you go way beyond the normal usage and they have no other use than to help you fool the search engine spiders, making search engine promotion easier.

While I haven't yet heard of anyone that has been banned for using CSS to manipulate his pages, there's always a (small) risk with this kind of stuff. So, before altering your pages, make sure you're ready to face the possible consequences and do not blame me if you get in trouble by playing with this stuff (although I'd be happy to hear from it if someone manages to get banned from using CSS). Also notice that times change - what the search engines cannot do today, they might be able to do tomorrow. If the use of CSS in optimization becomes very wide-spread, it is possible that the search engines will develop techniques to read and interpret CSS, rendering this technique useless.

If you're willing to accept the risks, you probably want to know how it is done. Well, first you must learn CSS. Some good places to do that are HTML Help's CSS tutorial section and House of Style's CSS tutorial. After understanding the basics, you'll probably understand what to do and how to do it. But if you want some ideas or want to see what can be done before learning yet another (albeit easy) scripting language, check out the simple CSS tricks page I've made for your pleasure.

Minimize your risk

If you're planning on starting to seriously play with this, I recommend that you use only external stylesheets that are linked from the HTML, just like on my example page. Don't forget to create a robots.txt file that forbids the spiders to grab the external CSS file. Although most spiders usually ignore external CSS files, at least Inktomi has on occasion requested and indexed them, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

It is also preferable to use as much HTML element selectors as possible (ie. specifying that all H1 headings should be no larger than regular text) instead of class selectors that force you to insert 'class="classname"' definitions in your HTML code. These are just precautions and you will probably do fine even without obeying them, but in the long run, they might save you from a lot of headache. The example page I've created doesn't completely follow the last rule and relies heavily on class selectors used together with the HTML tag SPAN. This is a direct result from the need to show-off different tricks. If possible, try to avoid the structure used in the example.