Hello everybody,
for a long time, I've been trying to figure out how to reduce my home page size, include lots of content and keywords and still make it look appealing to visitors. I had no success, until I started reading more about CSS.
What is CSS you ask? Well, CSS stands for Cascading Styling Sheets. The whole purpose of using CSS is to separate your content from your design. In simple terms, your content is placed on your page, where your feel and look of the page and it's elements is placed in a separate file. So instead of one big file that has everything, you would have two separate files.
So what are the benefits? Well, by removing all the formatting from your HTML page, you actually reduce the size of your file. I created a sample HTML page with CSS integrated and it has pretty much similar content as my current home page. My current page is http://www.ephiladelphiarealestate.com. The test page is http://www.ephiladelphiarealestate.com/TestTemplate/page_1811674.html. My home page is around 139K in size. The new test page is around 47K in size. That's a huge difference. Google loves small pages.
It also makes it easier for search engines to read the contents of your page. Instead of jumping over all the HTML formatting code, the search engine sees lots of clean code and content.
I also ran another test. I decided to validate my HTML using w3c validator and the results were amazing. My new test page had 43 errors. My current home page had 467 errors. What does that tell you? If you separate your formatting into a separate file, your code becomes more managable and easier to maintain.
To read more on this topic, please visit this article that I found interesting: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/css-and-seo.shtml
P2 templates are great, but they're not SEO friendly. I would be extremely happy if there was a way to turn the template design completely off and apply my own CSS design.
Have fun everybody.
Your Bucks County real estate expert.