5. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Traditional print newspapers and magazines have been using ‘style sheets’
almost since the dawn of time itself! Turn to any page of a newspaper or magazine,
and you’ll find that both the type-face and design schema will remain constant.
Cascading style sheets brought to the web something web masters had long been
crying out for – the ability to easily control aspects of design and assure
visual continuity.
And this is exactly what style sheets have achieved. Not just font sizes and
typefaces, but many aspects of design can easily be controlled using one simple
template. A spammer’s delight!
If you have read our article ‘Five steps to success’, you will
already have learnt that certain HTML tags can be used to great effect in promoting
your website. Heading tags for example (<H1>, <H2> etc) are given
priority by some search engines when analysing the text of a given page.
Since CSS can be used to globally set the size of heading tags, spammers quickly
learnt that this could lead to effective search engine trickery. An <H1>,
typically reserved for main headlines, could be set in CSS to be the same font
size as used to contain all the text on any given page. Some sites therefor attempt
to artificially inflate their ranking by including huge chunks of keyword-rich
text within these modified <H1> tags.
Again, like all the tips and tricks mentioned in this article, this tactic
is best avoided. Algorithms have generally evolved to detect all these practices,
and the search engines have become very good at not only detecting, but banning
offending web sites.
A good rule of thumb for web site promotion is to stick to the rules set by
the search engines themselves. Effective web site promotion involves a lot of
hard work, research and relationship building. Done correctly, it can be very
effective indeed.
May we wish you every success in your campaign.
