Converting to CSS Positioning

Posted by Marios Alexandrou, SEO Resume.

One of the basic premises of search engine optimization (SEO) is that you want to maximize the "good stuff" on a page while minimizing the "bad stuff". That's right, SEO, at least the on-page efforts, pretty much boils down to that premise.

The tough part is that the list of good things to keep track of can be very long while the list of bad things is even longer. On the list of good things is using CSS to position and style elements on a page rather relying on tables. With CSS you can accomplish goals like making the page size smaller, having the actual content appear above most of the HTML code, and increasing the ratio of content to code. Can any of these actually improve rankings in search engines? It's hard to say, but I'm running a little experiment of my own for clues to the answer.

Just today I converted one of my well established web sites from using tables to using CSS. Here's a sample of the benefits I achieved from this migration:

The lines of code for a page have decreased. For example, the home page when from 385 lines to 145 lines which is a reduction of 240 lines. The side-effect of this is that the content makes up a greater proportion of the page versus the code.
Page size decreased. Again, using the home page as an example, I see that the size decreased from 20KB to 10.4KB. That's pretty good if you ask me. While search engines are quite capable of downloading much larger pages, perhaps this small page size will be seen as a signal of quality.
On the home page, the first piece of content that a search engine would encounter while parsing the source code moved up from line 256 to line 91. One of the cited benefits of CSS-coded designs is that the content can be made to appear farther up in the code which is something search engines reported like.
And one final speculative item of my own... If a site that's been around for years goes through an overhaul that affects every web page, it is possible this could be interpreted as a signal that the site is maintained and updated which search engines might like to "see".

With no other plans to change the site, this conversion should make for a nice test of the CSS is better theory. It's just too bad that any improvement with the search engines may take several weeks to manifest.

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