CSS 3: Good News for SEO People

Usually there is a huge gap in making a web site look good and making it optimized. To add animations and cool effects you either need to use Flash, which cannot be indexed by search engines, or you need to use JavaScript, which is extremely difficult and time consuming.

But there’s good news on the horizon. CSS 3 is currently being drafted, and is providing some awesome animation and graphics tools to web designers. The best part? CSS code allows HTML to be animated, but can be fully indexed by the search engines.

What does this mean? It means that the gap between a great looking site and a well optimized site is slowly becoming smaller. Safari and Google Chrome for example already support some of the most popular CSS3 drafts. If you have the current versions of one of these browsers, check out: http://www.zurb.com/playground. ZURB interactive has been playing around with CSS3 and has come up with some really cool stuff.

My personal favorite is the CSS3 dock. It imitates the Mac OS X dock for navigation. It looks really awesome and allows search engines to index the navigation just like any other set of links. This is a really exciting development.

There are some issues however. First off, the most popular browser of today is Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer has a long history of not adopting the W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. (It is the only major browser not to). This means that web designers will have to design their sites in such a way that it still displays ok to Internet Explorer users. (And maybe show them a message that they are not getting a full internet experience.)

Another problem is hardware. These new features are resource intensive. The browsers need to have efficient display engines to display these effects, and probably should have hardware acceleration (which most browsers do not).

These are really the only issues, and I am looking forward to the CSS3 changes coming to the market. So get your hands dirty and start learning some CSS3!