CSS' main function is to separate the presentation from the content. By putting some of the markup language into a different document, you "clean" your HTML source and reduce it to its most important aspect, ie. the keywords. Google likes nothing more than a clean source to easily access your actual content. What search engines look for is your keyword density, the more often they come up, the more relevant these words appear to crawlers. Keep your source to its bare minimum to avoid "watering down" your important keywords.

In many ways, this paragraph should have come first in our list. CSS is above all a site design tool. But again, CSS is not the only form of web presentation. There are countless examples of relatively successful online ventures using good old tables and HTML layers. In fact, if you were one of these sites, we wouldn't start with a big site makeover.

@InEuroDesign 2007