As an SEO specialist, you don’t really need to tap into all of the intricacies of website development. But you do need to know the basics, since the way a website is coded has a great impact on its performance and therefore SEO potential. In the post on HTML tags , we’ve gone through the HTML basics you need to understand to efficiently do website SEO. This time I offer you to dig into other coding languages developers use to make a website look good and make it interactive.
The languages are CSS and JavaScript, and in this post, I will introduce you to each of the two. Then, we’ll go through the major CSS and JS-related errors you can face when auditing your website. I’ll explain why each of the errors matters and how they can be fixed. The fixing part is something you’ll probably assign to your website developers. It’s just that this time you’ll be speaking the same language because after reading this guide you’ll know what external CSS is and why JS files returning a 302 response code is a problem.
What is CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and as the name suggests it allows creating websites in style. CSS is always used alongside HTML. It’s the wrapping paper that gives a gift box the merry look. A plain HTML web page would look like this minus the set width and left-side alignment.
The thing is today, CSS is used on every website, even if it is a rather dull-looking page from an RFC series of technical notes on how the Internet works.
The HTML markup sets the structure of a web page and defines its elements in a way Google can understand. CSS, in turn, styles the website header, footer, and navigation turning them visually appealing and user-friendly. With CSS, you can do a bunch of cool things:
- Set the color, font, and size of the text,
- Define spacing between elements,
- Control the way the elements are laid out on the page,
- Add background images or background colors.
CSS can be implemented in 3 ways:
- Inline . This is when the style attributes are added individually to every HTML element you want to style. This method is rarely used as it is too time-consuming.
-
Internally
. To set styles for the whole web page, the
