CSS stands for "cascading style sheets". The World Wide Web Consortium, also referred to as W3C, defines CSS as follows:

"Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced [...] By attaching style sheets to structured documents on the Web (e.g. HTML), authors and readers can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags."

"Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet mechanism that has been specifically developed to meet the needs of Web designers and users."

(http://www.w3.org/Style/)

Menus Contain Meaning

Site navigation information within menus can be a good clue to what a site is about. The rule of thumb is that you should avoid buzzwords and special terms in your navigation menu, unless you know for sure what you are doing and what audience you target.

When menus are keyword compatible, they're fairly clear and concise. Commonly, they utilize 2 to 10 graphic buttons leading to all the key pages on the site. When a search engine spider reads such a menu, it's able to quickly and easily figure out what your site is about and which pages are most important. As a rule, you put links to other pages of your site in the navigation menu. The search engine can analyze what the links to those pages say. They do that by reading what's within the text hyperlink or the alt text tag or they read the words around the hyperlink itself. They'll even include title tags and associate them with the link.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium, (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/tables.html)

"The HTML table model allows authors to arrange data -- text, preformatted text, images, links, forms, form fields, other tables, etc. -- into rows and columns of cells"

The use of tables for web page layouts has been popular with web designers because of their ability to position text and images in specific cell locations on a page, similar to laying out a newspaper.

The META Description

Syntax:

<meta name="description" content="a short description of your site" />

The contents of the META description tag is what most search engines and directories will show under your title in the search result list. If you have not provided any META Description Tag to your web page, the search engines try to make one for you, often using the first few words of your web page or a text selection where the keyword phrases searched by the users appear. If the Search Engine makes up a description by picking up text from your page, the generated description my not do you web page justice.

Since the spiders see your page as HTML code instead of what is directly visible on your HTML pages, optimizers must gain a solid understanding of the structure of a typical HTML document as well.

This lesson will guide you through some HTML basics and then tell you which elements are critical for optimization and why.

After the preliminary research, you will be set up with the list of keyword suggestions for every page of your site; 5 to 20 suggestions for each page should be enough.

The best optimization technique is to get every one of your pages optimized for one or two (maximum three) excellently matching keywords. Thus, the aim of the advanced keyword research is to pick out the best 1-2 keywords for every page of your site from the list of 5-20 suggestions you have obtained at the end of the preliminary research.

You will be able to better understand the basics of your keyword selection tasks if you keep in mind how Web surfers usually enter their queries and what results they expect back.

Most engines will offer you advanced search options. It is important for us to consider the possibility of constraining the search to an exact match with the help of double quotes. Thus, if you type in the search box Free Marketing Newsletter you will get around 8,000,000 results as competition. These are the pages that randomly contain the words "Free", "Marketing" and "Newsletter", in various combinations.