CSS is a terrific timesaver - separating presentation from content saves you hours and hours of updating time.

It also streamlines your HTML, thereby giving your visible content more “weight” on the page.

But there’s another advantage to using CSS: you can use absolute positioning to source order your content - meaning that you can present the search engine bots with the most important part of the page first.

For example, this is the order in which your content might appear on your page:

1. navigational links
2. main content
3. footer content

In a regularly designed page, without CSS positioning, that is the order in which your page elements would appear to a search engine bot.

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You’ve chosen your DOCTYPE and created the head of your XHTML document, with keyword-rich title and meta description tags, the meta charset tag, and a link to the style sheet. Now you’re ready to create the visible part of your document.

Just as search engine optimization and web development go hand in hand, so do XHTML and CSS. Separating style from presentation is crucial for SEO - the less markup a search engine bot has to crawl through, the faster it gets to and indexes your content. The time saved is negligible in human terms, but there are millions of web pages out there competing with you - if you’re smart, you’ll make it easy for a hungry bot to find what it craves: content.

You could also embed style into your document tags, or put the CSS in the head of your document, but that kind of defeats the purpose. It’s much easier to have a separate stylesheet - you’ll only have one file to change if you make an update to a font, color, background, or position of an element.

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