[This article was revised on 13 February 2014, and supercedes the versions released in 2003, 2006, and 2009. It may be used in any newsletter/ezine or web site, PROVIDED its content is unaltered and both this permission statement and About the Author statement at the end are left intact. Furthermore, the author's byline and copyright date must appear wherever this article is published. A notice of re-publication is appreciated and may be sent by email to Parson Place primary email address.]

Optimizing Your Web Site for the Search Engines Using CSS and Javascript

by Michael L. White Copyright © 2003, 2006, 2009, 2014. All Rights Reserved.

Two of the greatest techniques to come along for web site refinement are cascading style sheets (CSS) and javascript navigational menus. In this article, I want to show you how to use both of these to ease the strain of site maintenance while defending against at least two problems with using javascript menus.

CSS can make web site maintenance much easier by consolidating a site's style and appearance attributes into one central file which can be edited alone and yet affect the look of the entire site. Just as wonderful, one javascript file can accomplish a similar effect with your site's navigational menu by making it available to every page on your site through a single line of code per page linking that page to the javascript file. By removing all this CSS style and javascript code into two separate files, you will clean up your web pages' textual content, thus making it easier for search engine spiders to crawl and index your site and more effectively rank it according to your actual textual content. These are definitely two techniques worth implementing.

Here are the examples to show you how this is done. First, here's how your web page should look incorporating both the CSS and the navigational menu javascript file:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Your Page Name</TITLE>
<LINK TYPE="text/css" MEDIA="Screen" REL="stylesheet" HREF="http://www.yourdomain.com/your_css_file.css">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV ID="center">
<H1>Your Page Name</H1>
Your page's textual content goes here.... </DIV>
<DIV ID="left">
Your navigational menu is inserted here from your javascript file using the following line of code. See the next example for sample code for the navigational menu javascript file.
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript" TYPE="text/javascript"
SRC="http://www.yourdomain.com/your_nav_menu_file.js"> </SCRIPT>
</DIV>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Now, here's how your navigational menu javascript file should look:

document.write('<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/your_web_file1.html">Page One</a>'); <BR>
document.write('<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/your_web_file2.html">Page Two</a>'); <BR>
You can add as many menu items as you need, so you get the picture.

Finally, here's the part of the code in your CSS file which gives your site the table-like look without the high-maintenance, cluttered effect of the HTML TABLE code:

...other CSS code, such as font style, etc., can precede the following segment.

/*The #left and #center blocks of code below correspond to the left and center columns on your web page. You can also add a #right, #top, and #footer section to your pages, if you desire.*/

#left
{ position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
width: 220px;
padding: 10px;
margin: 5px;
background-color: #f2f2f2;
}

#center
{ top: 0px;
margin-left: 230px;
padding: 10px;
}

Hopefully, those examples give you a fairly good idea of the benefit of using these two powerful practices. For more about using CSS, I can recommend HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World at SitePoint.com (I bought the eBook edition).

Besides these two optimization techniques, however, we're also hearing about all kinds of ways to optimize our web sites for the search engines these days. The competition for those coveted top placements is fierce, for sure. We've heard all about how important it is to have good, pertinent content in the textual portion of our pages, how effective it can be to include our site's keywords within the alternate attributes (i.e, ALT="keyword") of our image tags, and how valuable a link to/from a high traffic, like-minded web site can be. All this is certainly true and well worth the effort to make our web pages rank higher in the search engines, but with all this improvement to web site maintenance, what is the downside? Well, take note, so you can say you saw it here first.

I've detected two pesky problems in this web page wonderland. One is the absence of navigational links for search engine spiders to follow, and the other is the possibility of javascript-disabled web browsers. That's right; as fabulous as it is to store our navigational menu in one javascript file for easier updating, it removes all the key links from our start page so the search engine spiders have no other pages left to index on our site, and javascript-disabled web browsers can't see a menu at all! What's a webmaster to do? Well, here's how I decided to handle it.

I put my navigational menu with its various links to all my site's other pages within a <NOSCRIPT> tag pair immediately following the place where the link to my javascript navigational menu file is located. This way when the search engine spiders come calling, they can follow every link from my navigational menu to every other page on my site, and, at least, javascript-disabled web browsers will still have a menu to follow. For all the rest of my pages, however, I have used the line of code calling the javascript file containing my navigational menu in order to take advantage of its centralization benefits. The more pages I add to my site over time, the more beneficial this approach will be, too. I see it as having the best of both worlds: easy site maintenance and search engine optimization.

So, if you want to lighten your web site maintenance load while keeping your site optimized for the search engines, I recommend using CSS to consolidate your site's style attributes, to include a tableless, yet table-like, appearance and the centralization of a single javascript file containing your navigational menu. Just don't remove your navigational links from your start page.

To see how I've done this, you can visit three of my web sites at http://www.digitalevangelism.com, http://www.parsonplacepress.com and http://www.parsonplace.com. You're welcome to email me anytime at Parson Place primary email address with any questions or comments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael L. White is a Christian pastor and Internet entrepreneur who currently manages multiple web sites, including Parson Place Press LLC ( http://www.parsonplacepress.com), which publishes Christian books, and Parson Place ( http://www.parsonplace.com), which has a more personal bent. The Parson Place site also has a subscription-only email list to keep you abreast of news and information pertinent to conservative Christian areas of interest.