What are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?

What are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is one of the most important tools for web developers. It’s a language that allows you to style your website however you want by applying commands to your HTML source code. You can change the font size, font color, background color, layout, among many other things, using CSS.

An advantage of using this tool is that it can let you change the styling on multiple websites that share the same HTML code. If you own more than one site, this feature is convenient. Also, by styling with CSS, you can have a separate document where all the commands are stored. This allows the HTML source code to stay clean and easy to access. Thus, website maintenance becomes much more manageable.

How does CSS improve SEO?

Using CSS can make your website SEO friendly. Search engine bots (or crawlers) can go through your HTML much faster if it’s clean and concise. Bots don’t need to scan through both the HTML and CSS code since the styling is done in a separate document.

For web developers, this feature is very convenient, as it gives a sense of order. CSS also makes your site lightweight, which translates into a faster loading speed.

Cascading Style Sheets also bring the benefit of arranging your content much more efficiently. The CSS commands make it easier to organize your site and display information in a way that is aesthetically pleasing.

CSS uses tags much like HTML. The language uses the <h1> tag to identify the main header. It is something fundamental to keep an eye on these since search engines use them to identify valuable and relevant content.

Other useful tags are <ul> and <a>.

The <ul> tag allows you to create menus and the <a> one stands for ‘anchor.’ The anchor tag is the one responsible for linking content to other areas of your site, making the links easy to find for search engines.