< link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css" rel="nofollow" >

It is now easy to change background image or color of your site by simply changing variables in stylesheet. You can also change how text in your in your website looks Anything in "P" tags on your web pages takes on "P" attributes specified in stylesheet. The above will make your pages display Verdana text (and you give option of Helvetica and sans-serif in case your visitor's computer does not support first choice) which is 12 pt and navy.

The next source of confusion is use of CLASS attribute. But this is also real easy and very powerful. It is best explained by adding another style to our stylesheet explained above.

P.redtext { FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: red }

Now what this allows you to do is make certain blocks of text red. In your web pages, instead of a simple "P" tag around your text, you would add class="redtext" to "P" tag and text inside tags would be red.

You can have any number of classes and assign classes not only to P tags, but also to your table data TD, your links "A" and any tag contained in "BODY" of your web pages. And by simply changing stylesheet you can change look of your whole site. Are you beginning to see power of using style?

It is however important to realize Netscape and Internet Explorer deal with stylesheets differently and Netscape does not support them as fully as IE. Netscape basically takes inheritance a step too far. The only way to find out what goes and what doesn't is by trial and error, however there are a couple of resources which will help you a long way with understanding more about stylesheets. We have listed links to these resources at http://www.thewebseye.com/stylesheets.htm.

With simple stylesheets you should have no problem and they will really help to make sure your site keeps a certain amount of uniformity and cohesion.

I've seen many reports from different sites that used (notice past tense) Flash Intro pages. Hardly surprising is fact that on average, a whopping 20%-30% of visitors left site after accessing ONLY homepage (where splash page or flash intro was).

The second reason to stay away from these is that it has a huge affect on search engines. Search engines can only index text, a huge graphic or flash intro doesn't give engines anything to index. As a result homepage, which is often highest ranking page on a site, has almost no chance of ranking well at all. In addition, depending on how links from graphic or flash to internal pages are coded, engines may not be able to follow links to rest of pages on site which means your site will not get spidered properly.

To summarize, stay away from splash pages and flash intro's. Give visitor some actual text to read and engines something to index. Your visitor retention will go up, and so will your search engine traffic.

*Hyperlinks*

Hyperlinks are your bread and butter when dealing with search engines. They are way in which search engines find all of pages on your site and index them. If a search engine can't follow a hyperlink, it won't be able to index destination page, meaning parts of your site may become invisible to engines.

Be sure to use only true hyperlinks in your site. I've seen many sites that use some javascript links instead of actual hyperlinks. While these will work for most browsers (about 90%), they don't give engines anything to follow.

A true hyperlink should say:

href="URL of page here.html" rel="nofollow"

Any other type of link is most likely not going to be followed properly.

*Body Text*

As I mentioned before, engines can only index text. Too often I see sites that use graphic representations of text or a large graphic that has some of their most important text within it. Do whatever you can to stay away from this. If your most important words are in graphic format, you have taken away thing that engines need most to properly index and rank your site.

Engines also want to see continuity in structure of a page. When a webmaster uses lots of tables, frames, and other design elements, it breaks up flow of text on page, and can have a negative effect on your rankings.

Whenever possible, use as few tables as possible. When you do use tables, do your best to not break up a paragraph or sentence into separate cells in a table, this destroys flow of text and causes words to be seen as unrelated fragments instead of part of same continuous sentence/paragraph.

It is important to realize that engines do not see pages same way a visitor does. While visitor sees page displayed properly with all of next flowing nicely, an engine sees only HTML code behind page that breaks up flow of text.

In general, simpler page and HTML behind it, better ranking will be.

*Summary*

Always be sure to be aware of impact that a particular design element will have on both your visitors and ability of engines to properly index your site.

By understanding how engines work, what they look for, what they can and can't do, you will vastly increase your chances of successfully achieving rankings needed to make your business a success.