Member Avatar for cmills83

I have been teaching myself SEO lately and need a little guidance. I am learning CSS, but how does it effect the sites position on Google?
Also does someone have some tutorials for site construction that make it optimized for search engines, specifically Google?
What is the best size for a site to be to get the best search engine positions, I have heard under 15k and 50-60k but I wanted some other opinions. Thanks for the feedback!

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Quick answer for : CSS itself is not a direct ranking signal — search engines read the HTML content, not your stylesheet names — but CSS affects crawl/rendering, accessibility and page speed, which do affect visibility. Don’t put meaningful text into CSS (pseudo-elements or the content property); keep real content in the DOM. (developers.google.com)

Practical checklist (build this into any tutorial you follow): use semantic HTML (prefer <main>, <article>, <nav> over “everything in divs”), use heading tags to structure the page (H1 for the main topic, H2/H3 for subsections), keep important text as real HTML (not graphics or CSS-only text), and make sure your CSS/JS files are not blocked by robots.txt so Google can render pages correctly. Optimize for real-user performance: inline only the critical CSS for first paint, defer or preload the rest, compress and minify assets, optimize images/fonts, and measure LCP/INP/CLS. Test with Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. (developer.mozilla.org)

About page size and links: there’s no magic byte-size like “15K” that guarantees ranking. Modern pages are often much larger; what matters is perceived and real performance (Core Web Vitals) and content quality. Backlinks remain an important ranking signal (as noted), but they are only one part of Google’s systems — quality content, technical health and UX all matter. For step‑by‑step learning, start with Google’s SEO Starter Guide, MDN’s HTML/CSS docs, and the web.dev performance guides; use them with Search Console and Lighthouse to validate changes. (developers.google.com)

Short troubleshooting tips: if results look wrong in Search Console use the URL Inspection -> Live Test to see the rendered HTML; check robots.txt for blocked CSS/JS; and run Lighthouse to find render‑blocking CSS or oversized resources.

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Member Avatar for newsman007

google is different than any of the other search engine. It rankings mainly have to do with how many sites you are linked too. Not much else.


newsman007

Member Avatar for mnemtsas

Personally I believe that CSS can only help your SE rankings, but I wouldnt expect too much (or anything actually) :mrgreen: . Why? It makes your html cleaner, easier to index, smaller, and faster to load.

Member Avatar for newsman007

yes, it will will help in all of the search engines,except google which it won't hurt , but will not give him a better ranking.


newsman

Member Avatar for cmills83

Alright thanks! If anyone has tutorials for more advanced CSS please let me know. What exactly is the <div> or <div id> function? does that just assign a class to a group (of links, etc.)? Also if someone has a tutorial using CSS with HTML tables or the <Span> tag please let me know. Thanks again!

Member Avatar for cmills83

N/m I figured it out, except the <span> tag but that is next on my list. :) Thanks for the feedback though!

Member Avatar for jewboy

CSS is very useful for SEO. The engines place high priority on H1 and H2 text/keywords. Without using CSS, the tags most likely will not fit the look and scheme of your pages. Use CSS to alter the look of the tags to your liking.

Member Avatar for Dani

The <div> tag is used as a wrapper around paragraphs. For example,

<div class="paragraph1">This is paragraph one</div>
<div class="paragraph2">This is paragraph two</div>

Then, you can customize each paragraph / text box to place it somewhere on the page, add a border, etc. Span tags work similar to div tags only they are meant to just highlight a particular word or phrase within a paragraph of text. For example

<div class="textbox">This <span class="emphasized">textbox</span> is a good demonstration.</div>
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