Cascading Style Sheets
Last month, we introduced you to a standard layout language called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). While Starkmedia has been using CSS to design sites for a relatively short period of time, the results of our CSS work so far have been impressive. Not only has it produced cleaner, crisper looking web sites, but it has also given our search engine optimization results an extra boost. While loading site text, meta tags, and alt tags with targeted keywords remains the best way to climb to the top of the search engines, CSS-based sites provide search engine spiders with easy access to these keywords. As a result, the sites have jumped to the top of the search engines in a relatively short period of time.

This Old Quiet House
One of our more recent web site redesign projects exemplifies this result. With luxury suites located throughout Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa; Quiet House's target market includes business and leisure travelers. As one of Starkmedia's long-time clients, Quiet House has utilized our search engine optimization services to reach this demographic for nearly four years. Generally, search engine optimization on the site was successful. However, it became obvious after a certain period of time that the search engine spiders were not crawling the site as efficiently as before. Spiders tend to favor newer sites over older ones, and the fact that the original site was constructed using tables tangled the spiders even more.

Starkmedia was thrilled when Quiet House gave them the opportunity to redesign their site. Not only did our designers have the chance to give it a more updated look, but they were also able to apply newer targeted keywords to the overall site while putting the power of CSS to the test.

The newly redesigned quiethouse.com launched in December of 2005. While it has only been live for a couple of months, the search engine results have been pleasantly surprising. Overall, the keywords that have been ranked so far appear on the first and second pages of the search engines. As of the writing of this article, quiethouse.com occupies the much-coveted number one spot on Google under many targeted search terms such as Dodgeville romantic getaway, executive suite Galena, Mequon whirlpool suite, Williamsburg Iowa romantic getaway, and Illinois theme suite. This is especially impressive considering that Google spiders tend to be the pickier of the search engines and take their time spidering new sites.

CSS - A Firm Foundation for Search Engine Success
Starkmedia’s team of web developers and internet marketing specialists are always anxious to discover new ways to improve sites’ search engine performance. Based upon our observations so far, CSS is fast becoming the best platform from which successful search engine optimization campaigns begin. To find out more about CSS and other search engine optimization information, call us at 414.226.2710 or click here.