Monday 5 December 2011

Google Algorithm Updates: The Latest Things To Consider

Google algorithm "transparency" continues

Google has been making a big deal about wanting to be more transparent about its search algorithm lately (without revealing the secret sauce too much of course). And so far, I have to say they're making good on that promise fairly well.

Is Google being transparent enough for your liking?

We've seen plenty of algorithmic announcements made from the company over the course of the year. In November, they discussed ten recent changes they had made. Here's a recap of those:

  • Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
  • Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
  • Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page's title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page's content.
  • Length-based auto complete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
  • Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
  • Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
  • Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we've made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
  • Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
  • Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
  • Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Friday 2 December 2011

Debunking Common SEO Misconceptions and Myths

Search Engine Optimization, can provide the best ROI for your internet marketing budget. Because it is widely misunderstood and just as commonly misused and abused, there are plenty of misconceptions about SEO that can derail your marketing efforts.

SEO misconceptions

Here are some commonly held beliefs that need some clarification:

“I don’t need on site SEO, just 100 more links”

There is just too much misinformation about SEO out there for you to assume your on site optimization has been done right. Many times we will have a new client tell us it is all taken care of, then we discover their pages are keyword stuffed, title tags are too long or duplicated, no meta descriptions exist, all the internal links say “click here”, content is duplicated elsewhere in the site or stolen from another site, or pages are cloaked or hidden in an attempt to trick the search engines.

Another variation of this is the idea that some webmasters have that on site optimization is not necessary and all you need is lots and lots of backlinks. You have figured out how many links your competitor has, and it is only a matter of getting more than them, right? Nope – if it was that easy, anybody with some time could make a totally crappy site rank #1 for everything and nobody would ever use search engines.

While inbound links to your site are one of the most important things that will help your website rank better, quality is becoming increasingly important to Google, links are becoming less important and social signals (Likes, +1′s, Tweets, etc) are becoming more important. Make sure you are creating good quality content, your site is well optimized, and make it easy for readers to like your site.

“My web designer already optimized my website”

Web designers and developers often don’t know or don’t care what is important to search engines. If the site looks good and all the buttons work, then it is all good as far as they are concerned. There are many web designers who know SEO, but they are kind of rare. Unfortunately, most web design classes teach the software and visual design skills, but don’t bother with optimization best practices. I recently had a web design instructor tell me that he doesn’t teach SEO because it “has nothing to do with web development and it doesn’t work”! Um, yeah. Right. Think about that when you hire a web designer who just finished school.

Here are some things that are so basic to search engine optimization that you just can’t call a site optimized if they have not been dealt with properly. These things really should not even be considered as separate from web design since they should be part of any web developer’s best practices when building a website.

Wednesday 30 November 2011

Link Wheel – Powerful & Effective Concept for Natural Link Building

With the Internet era touching new heights, drawing quality traffic towards a blog or website has become absolutely necessary to increase its net worth. One of the best ways to soar high in search results is to build natural links that Google will simply love. Link wheel is an outstanding link building strategy that imitates the natural Internet pattern making use of the power of multiplication to get links from your related niche. Link wheels have the ability to boost up your link count significantly over a period of time.

Link wheel creation involves interlinking different websites to the central focal point that is your parent website. The entire link wheel process builds links that go from your parent website to various sites having web 2.0 properties. By submitting unique and appealing content in these web 2.0 property websites, you can get at least two backlinks to your parent website. Google highly values such links as the content on these web 2.0 sites is qualitative and is related to your specific niche. This makes your website a dominant feature, which you can use to boost up your search engine rankings, and thus make your website reach far and wide.

Key Features of Link Wheel Creation Process

  • Our link building strategy makes use of only high quality, relevant websites.
  • We submit content to websites and web 2.0 platforms with page rank 4 to 9.
  • Content is submitted only after client’s approval.
  • The client can choose the target URL to either promote his home page and/or any of the inner pages.
  • We offer cost-effective link building packages that are unmatched in the industry.

By combining the effective link building technique of link wheel in our other link building packages, we can produce phenomenal results for you.

10 Recent Google Algorithm Changes To Be Aware Of

Google makes around 500 changes to their algorithm every year to make the search easy and to provide updated results to the users. Anytime there is a change in the Google Algorithm, it becomes news. There have been some recent changes to Google, but there is no need to guess these changes as Google has released the details of the changes and how these changes impact the search results and rankings of the websites in SERP.

Here is the brief of the recent Google Algorithm changes:

1) For queries in language for which limited content is available, Google will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. For webmasters, it will be beneficial as they can now search new markets, which couldn’t be done previously due to language boundaries.

2) The snippets on the search result page now show more page content and less header/menu content. It points out that Google is starting to put more attention to the text in “Actual Page Content” than headers and menu content. For webmasters, they need to ensure that they are presenting right content on the right page.

3) Google found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so these will be given less emphasis. For webmasters, they need to understand that site wide linking (in headers, footers and blog rolls) will not lead to any better ranking.

4) An Autocomplete prediction in Russian has been improved. Now, Google will not do predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already practiced in English. This is good news for Russian users but not useful for English users.

5) Users searching for software applications will see more rich snippets including cost and user reviews, within their search results. For webmasters, it would be useful to add descriptive rich snippets for software applications in order to get a higher ranking.

6) Google retired a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web. This tweak is aimed to improve image search function. But maybe Google is trying to decrease the link juice from sites like Flicker, Dailymotion, etc.

7) Google made a significant change on how to rank the fresh content. This change impacted around 6-10% of the search results and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query. This change would highly benefit the news websites. For webmasters, they need to update the content on regular basis in order to rank high in Google.

8) Google will tend to rank official websites even higher on Google’s result page. And this change is intended to provide the users with more relevant and authoritative results. Basically, this is good news for long-established brands. The official sites will get better rankings and the industry giants get a stronger hold on search results too!

9) Date-restricted queries have been improved to ensure that users get the most relevant results for that specific date range. It means if your company’s news is in Google News then expect it to be given more prominence now during the time the news is still relevant.

10) Autocomplete predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic have been improved. There is nothing specific about it; just the user experience for non-English speaking users will get better.

For website owners and webmasters, they need to work accordingly to get their websites rank high in search engines. Focus more on the content part of the website as it is given more importance and try to use the variations of anchor texts for linking.

Friday 23 September 2011

An SEO Checklist for New Sites

Over 160,000 new top-level domains were registered yesterday. 160,000! This huge volume of new sites being birthed wasn't unique to yesterday; this happens every day (you can check out today's progress at DailyChanges.com. The sites that start out pre-optimized and that continue optimizing immediately after publishing will be at an incredible advantage over those that were made without SEO in place from the get-go. Of course, there's a lot of work to be done for a new site, and it can be hard to remember everything and prioritize work. This week, per PRO member request, Rand presents an SEO checklist that SEOs can use when optimizing new sites.Have any boxes of your own to add to the checklist? Let us know in the comments below!

Wistia
 

Video Transcription


Hi everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I have a special request from one of our users to talk about an SEO checklist for new sites that aren't ranking yet. I've created a new website. I want to make sure I am doing all the right things in the right order, that I have got everything set up, and my website is not yet ranking. What are the things that I should be doing and maybe some things that I should not be doing? So, I wanted to create a brief checklist with this Whiteboard Friday, and if we find this useful, maybe we will expand it and do even more stuff with it in the future.

So, let's run through. You have a new site that you've just launched. You are setting things up for success. What do you need to worry about?

First off, accessibility. What I mean by this is users and search engines both need to be able to reach all of the pages, all the content that you've created on your website in easy ways, and you need to make sure you don't have any dumb mistakes that can harm your SEO. These are things like 404s and 500 errors and 302s instead of 301s, duplicate content, missing title tags, thin content where there is not much material on the page for the search engines to grab on to and maybe for users as well. Two tools that are great for this, first off, Google Webmaster Tools, which is completely free. You can register at Google.com/webmasters. The SEOmoz Crawl through the SEOmoz Pro Web App, also very useful when you are looking at a new site. We built a bunch of features in there that we wish Google Webmaster Tools kept track of, but they don't, and so some of those features are included in the SEOmoz Crawl, including things like 302s for example and some thin content stuff. That can be quite helpful.

Next up, keyword targeting. This makes some sense. You have to choose the right keywords to target. What I want to have is if gobbledyzook - probably an awful word for anyone to be targeting, no search volume, just bad choice in general - but we want to be looking at, do these have good search volume? Are some users actually searching for them? You might not be able to target high value terms because you are also looking for low difficulty when you are first launching a site. You don't want to necessarily shoot for the moon. Maybe you do on your home page or some branded page, some product page, but for the things that you know you want to target and you want to work on early short term, maybe some content that you've got, some feature pages for the product or service you are offering, and you think to yourself, I am not going to be able to target gobbledly, which is really tough, but maybe gobbledyzook. That will be easier. So, you can look at search volume, the relevance to the website, please by all means make sure that you have something that is relevant that is actually pulling in searches you care about, and low difficulty. If you have that taken care of, you have your keyword targeting.

Content quality and value. If you have a bunch of users coming to this page and they're thinking to themselves, this doesn't really answer my query, or yeah, maybe this answers one portion of it, but I wish there was more detail here, more video, more images, maybe a nice graphic that explains some things, a data set, some references to where they got this information. Not just a bunch of blocks of text. Maybe I am looking for something that describes a process, something that explains it fully. If you can do that, if you can build something remarkable, where all of these people change from "Huh, huh, what's this?" To, oh, you know what, instead it's "I am happy." "I also am happy." "This page makes me do happy. Yea, I am going to stick my tongue out." If you can get that level of enjoyment and satisfaction from your users with the quality of the content that you produce, you're going to do much better in the search engines. Search engines have some sophisticated algorithms that look at true quality and value. You can see Google has gotten so much better about putting really good stuff in results, even sometimes when it doesn't have a lot of links or it is not doing hardcore keyword targeting, when it is great stuff, they are doing a good job of ranking it.

Next up, design quality, user experience, and usability. This is tough. Unless you have a professional designer or you have a professional design background, you almost certainly need to hire someone or go with a very simple, basic design that is very user friendly that you know when you survey your friends, survey people in your industry, survey people in your company, survey people in your ecosystem, that they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, this looks really good. I am really happy with the design. Maybe I am only giving it a six out ten in terms of beauty, but an eight out of ten in terms of usability. I understand the content on this site. It is easy for me to find things and they flow. There is really no point in ranking unless you are nailing these two, because you are not going to get many more customers. People are just going to be frustrated by the website. There are a few tools you can use on the Web to test these out. Five Second Test, Feedback Army, Silverback App, all of these are potentially useful for checking the usability user experience of the site.

Social account setup. Because social and SEO are coming together like never before, Google is showing plus ones and things that people share by default in the search engine rankings. Bing is showing all the stuff that has been shared on Facebook, and they are putting it above the rest of the content. It really, really pays to be in social, and social signals help search engines better rank things as well as having a nice second order effect on user and usage data, on branding, on the impact of people seeing those sites through social sharing and potentially linking to them. So social account setup, at the very least, you probably want to have these four: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Google+ is only about 25 million, but it is growing very fast. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook are all over 150 million users right now. I think Twitter is at 200 million. Facebook is at 750 million. So at least have your pages set up for those. Make sure the account experience is the same across them, using the same photos, same branding, same description, so people get a good sense when they see you in the social world. You probably want to start setting something up to be monitoring and tracking these. You might want to sign up for something like a Bitly. I used to really recommend PostRank, but unfortunately they don't track Facebook, since Google bought them, anymore. So it is a little more frustrating. The SEOmoz Web App will start to track these for you pretty soon. Once you've got those social accounts set up, you can feel good about sharing the content that you are producing through those social accounts, finding connections, building up in that world, and spending the appropriate amount of time there depending on the value you are feeling back from that.

Next up, link building. This is where I know a lot of people get sort of off to the wrong start, and it is incredibly hard to recover. I actually just got an email in my inbox before we started doing Whiteboard Friday from someone who had started a new website and he is like, "I got these 300 links, and now I am not ranking anymore. I was doing great last week. For the first six weeks after I launched, I was ranking great." I sort of did just a quick look at the back links, and I went, "Oh, oh no." I think this person really went down the route of I am going to get a bunch of low quality, easy to acquire links, and for a new site in particular, it is so dangerous, because Google is just really on top of throwing people out of the index or penalizing them very heavily when their link profile looks really scummy. When you don't have any trustworthy quality signals to boost you up, that's when low quality links can hurt the most.

So, good things to do. Start with your business contacts and your customers. They are great places to get links from. Your customers are willing to link to you. Awesome. Get them to link to you. If the contacts that you have in the business world are willing to say, hey, my friend Rand just launched a new website, boom, that's a great way of doing it. All your email contacts, your LinkedIn contacts, the people that you know personally and professionally, if you can ask them, hey, would you support me by throwing a link to me on your About page or your blog roll or your list of customers or your list of vendors, whatever it is.

Guest posts and content. This is a great way to do good content positive content production and earning links back for that. Finding trustworthy sites that have lots of RSS subscribers and are well renowned and can give you visibility in front of your audience and give you a nice link back if you can contribute positively to those. I also like high quality resource lists. So, this would be things like the Better Business Bureau maybe, that sort of falls a little in the directory world, but something like a CrunchBase. If you are a startup in the technology world, you definitely need to have a CrunchBase listing. You might want to be on some Wikipedia lists. Granted those are no-follow, but that's still okay. That is probably a good place to get some visibility. There might be industry specific lists that are like these are heavy machine production facilities in the United States. Great, okay, I should be on that list. That's what I do. News media and blogs. Getting the press to cover you. Getting blogs in your sphere to cover you. Finding those, emailing the editors, letting them know that you are launching this new website, that's a great time to say, "Hey this business is transforming. We're launching a new site. We're changing our branding," whatever it is. That is sort of a press worthy message and you can get someone to look at you. Review sites, review blogs are great for this too. They'll sort of say, oh, you've got a new application, you've got a new mobile service, maybe we'll link to you. That could be interesting.

Relevant social industry and app account links. If I contribute something to the Google Chrome store, if I contribute something to the Apple store, if I am contributing something to a design portal or design gallery, all of those kinds of industry stuff and accounts that you can get are likely worth getting your website listed on.

Social media link acquisitions. This is obvious stuff where you spend time on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Google+ connecting with people and over time building those relationships that will get you the links possibly through one of these other forms or just through the friendliness of them noticing and liking, and enjoying your content. That's what content marketing is all about as well.

These are great ways to start. Very safe ways to do link building. They are not short-term wins. These, almost all of them, require at least some effort, some investment of your time and energy, some creativity, some good content, some authenticity in your marketing versus a lot of the stuff that tempts people very early on. They're like, oh, sweet, you know, I have a new website. I need to get like 500 links as soon as possible, so I am going to try things like reciprocal link pages. I am just going to put up a list of reciprocal link partners, and I am going to contact a bunch of other firms. They'll all link to me and we'll all link to each other. It will be a happy marriage of links. No, it's not. It's not a wonderland.

Low quality directories. You search for SEO friendly directory, if it shows up on that list, chances are . . . even in Google. Google is showing you a bunch of bad stuff. Someone was asking me recently on email, they said, "Hey, I really need some examples of sites that have done manipulative link building." I was like, "Oh, it's so easy. Search for SEO friendly directory and look at who has paid to be listed in those directories." They almost all have spammy manipulative link profiles, and it is funny because you go to those, and I don't know why people don't do this, but try searching for the brand names that come up in those lists. None of them rank for their own brand name. Why is that? Clearly, they are killing themselves with these terrible, terrible links. So, low quality directories, really avoid them.

Article marketing or article spinning, I talked about that a few weeks ago on Whiteboard Friday, also a practice I would strongly recommend you avoid, especially, I know it can work, I know there are people for whom it does work, but especially early on, it can just kill you. It really can get you banned or penalized out of the engines, and you just won't rank anywhere if your link profile starts out spammy. Paid links is another obvious one.

Forums, open forums, spam kind of going across the Web. Oh, here's a guest book that's open and forgot to put no-follow. I am going to leave a link there. Oh, here look, it's a forum that accepts registration, and they forgot to close their no-follow off, anyone can leave a link. Even things like do-follow blogs, do-follow blog comments, man, it's really risky because they are linking to bad places a lot of the time and it is usually manipulative people who have no intent to create something of value for the search engines. They are merely trying to manipulate their rankings. Whenever you have a tactic like that it attracts people who have nasty websites, and then Google looks at those and goes, okay, they're linking to a bunch of nasty sites. Well, I don't want to count those links, or maybe I am even going to penalize some of the people that they are linking to. That really sucks. Then link farms, which is essentially setting up all these different systems of links that point to each other across tons of domains that are completely artificial or link for no human reason, or no discernable human reason, and are merely meant to manipulate the engines.

This type of stuff is very, very dangerous when you are early on. If you have already built up a good collection of these types of links, you are much safer. You do have some risk in those first three, six, nine months after you have launched a new site around doing wrong things on the link building front and getting yourself into a situation where you are penalized. We see a ton of that through SEOmoz Q&A. I get it in email. You see it on the Web all the time. So, be cautious around that.

Saturday 6 August 2011

The Power of CSS

In this lesson we would like to give you a better idea of CSS and provide more examples of how it can be used for pure, light-coded and effective web design. First, let's define CSS. 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/)

How style sheets work?

First, define a style. For instance, you want to define text as deep blue 12px size Verdana font in bold:
Color: #5500DD;
Font-size: 12px;
Font-family: Verdana;
Font-weight: bold
;

Next, we give this style a particular custom name (further referred to as "class"):
Mystyle
{
Color: #5500DD;
Font-size: 12px;
Font-family: Verdana;
Font-weight: bold;
}

…or, alternatively, we associate it with a particular HTML tag:
h1
{
Color: #5500DD;
Font-size: 12px;
Font-family: Verdana;
Font-weight: bold;
}

Styles can be declared in the HTML document itself with the help of the <style> tag anywhere in the document. However, it's preferable to keep them out of your page in a separate file with the ".css" extension ("mystyle.css") to further reduce the size of your HTML file. To be able to use the styles declared by that file in your HTML document, you must provide a link to "mystyle.css" within the HEAD area of your html document:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="mystyle.css">
With the link described above in your HEAD area, all HTML tags that have styles defined for them in the "mystyle.css" will yield these styles when shown in browser.

How can CSS help with optimization?

Imagine there's some HTML code used to print a heading on your page:
<strong><font color="#FF0000" size="24px">Main Heading of My Site</font></strong>
Now look how the same effect can be achieved using styles:
<span class="mystyle"> Main Heading of My Site </span>
The HTML code for the CSS tag is half as long as the code without the CSS. This, as you already know, is an advantage with search engine spiders as it can give more weight to your content because of the improved content-to-code ratio.
And even better:
<h1> Main Heading of My Site </h1>
(with a <link rel="stylesheet" href="mystyle.css"> in the HEAD and provided a style is declared for the H1 heading in “mystyle.css”).

CSS rollovers vs. JavaScript rollovers

Rollover menu effects are very popular. However, they commonly require JavaScript implementation. Fortunately, rollovers can be made via CSS that do not require any scripting and are fully readable by the spiders.
CSS lets you avoid using JavaScript and still emulate rollover effects with grace in a small file, but one of the greatest benefits is providing more textual content for spiders to read. Using CSS to dictate rollover effects instead of separate images will give you an effective advantage in the search engine battle, especially if the textual links are your key phrases.

CSS static-text popup effect

Let's create static-text popup purely through the power of CSS. It can be achieved like this:
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/css/">Links<span>Some text here Some text here Some text here </span></a>
As you can see the "popup" text is a span element inside the hyperlink. And one more thing to do is to give the command and prevent the text from showing up when the page loads:
div#links a span {display: none;}
Images can be the element inside the hyperlinks too. Here's one example from the source of this document:
<a href="http:// www.mysite.com /css/">Links<img src="picturename.gif">
To prevent the image from showing up when the page loads, make a command:
div#links a img {height: 0; width: 0; border-width: 0;}
From the other hand we make them visual thanks to the:
div#links a:hover img {position: absolute; top: 190px; left: 55px; height: 50px; width: 50px;}

CSS image popup effect

Any beautiful picture you want to enlarge for the Web page visitors can be processed via CSS popup effect like this:
<style type="text/css">
.thumbnail{
position: relative;
z-index: 0;
}
.thumbnail:hover{
background-color: transparent;
z-index: 50;
}
.thumbnail span{ /*CSS for enlarged image*/
position: absolute;
background-color: lightyellow;
padding: 5px;
left: -1000px;
border: 1px dashed gray;
visibility: hidden;
color: black;
text-decoration: none;
}
.thumbnail span img{ /*CSS for enlarged image*/
border-width: 0;
padding: 2px;
}
.thumbnail:hover span{ /*CSS for enlarged image on hover*/
visibility: visible;
top: 0;
left: 60px; /*position where enlarged image should offset horizontally */
}
</style>
The effect will come in forth when the user moves its mouse over the specified image. You can include this "image popup" code on the HTML page.

CSS button effect instead of JavaScript

3-d button is another CSS creative design issue we'd like to recommend. This captivating effect gives the possibility to hit the button when mouse over it. See the picture below.
Example link
Make it work by help of mouse. To gain the effect you want feel free to use the code below:
a {
display: block;
border: 1px solid;
border-color: #aaa #000 #000 #aaa;
width: 8em;
background: #fc0;
}


a:hover
{
position: relative;
top: 1px;
left: 1px;
border-color: #000 #aaa #aaa #000;
}

Where CSS should be used with caution?

When you code your page using CSS you should always keep in mind that search engines don’t like to index hidden context. Thus, you should avoid using "display:none", "visibility:hidden" or similar definitions to hide sections stuffed with keywords. Such actions are definitely spamming and are not recommended.
Another technique you should avoid is producing the same color text and background with the help of CSS. Such technique is used by the spammers to hide keywords from the human visitors and can hurt your pages.
One more crucial thing – use HTML tags for their intended purpose. E.g., you shouldn’t use CSS to change the function of the tag if you don’t use it. There are classes instead.
The usage of CSS reduces to a minimum the size of the HTML code and provides the best opportunity to effectively use keywords in important HTML heading tags (h1, h2, etc.). But  remember – the time when CSS was invisible to search engines has gone by. Today’s engines can easily read cascading style sheets and thus they are aware of what they once were not!

What you should remember from this lesson:

  1. CSS is a perfect means for increasing your content-to-code ratio, lowering HTML file size, and compromising between clean visual design and clean code for spiders.
  2. You should avoid using CSS to visually hide sections stuffed with words or produce the same color text and background.