HTML has offered many ways of altering the appearance of text. Web Developers have been able to create headings, bold text, and text in italics and so on. With these tools, it has been easy to emphasize important words and ideas by making them stand out from the rest of the content. Naturally, search engines have also noticed these features. They know as well as we do those headings and bolded words usually tell a lot about the contents of the page. So, they’ve adjusted their algorithms to place more weight on a word that appears in a heading, or in bold, than to one that just appears in the body text.

For a designer, the matter in which search engine algorithms work can be a problem. Search engines may like H1-sized headings, but many visitors consider them to be ugly. As long as the content of your pages has any effect on their ranking, there will always be a conflict between what search engines and users want. These issues are usually solved by cloaking the page, which enables the designer to show one design to search engines and another to humans. However, cloaking takes plenty of work and sometimes money. If only minor visual changes are required to please both parties, a simpler solution would seem sufficient.

What is CSS?

As the Internet has developed, HTML has received an add-on called Cascading Style Sheets. This new language opens the possibility of altering the visual representation of pages without the use of HTML. While search engines still do not understand CSS very well, nearly all browsers support it to some degree.

Although CSS doesn’t offer the same flexibility and protection as cloaking, it is well-suited for making small design changes. However, an overwhelming majority of browsers understand CSS; most of them do not support all of its features. To avoid nasty surprises, it is best to check your pages in almost all available and most used browsers. As more recent versions of these browsers have better CSS support.

There are some “legal” things that can be done with CSS, build layout or to slightly adjust the size of headings and body text. Search engines consider the techniques which are known as spam, and it probably may ban a website if choose to use them. Using CSS to cheat the engines isn’t safe - it’s just somewhat safer than doing it with the traditional HTML method.