do engines read CSS?

[movezig]

i am relatively new to learning seo. but i have picked up alot of stuff about "dont make invisible text" and stuff like that, with potential to get banned from an engine altogether. they talk about invisible text being text that is the same color as your bg. well, my question is if engines will look at your CSS code, because i made a DIV tag in some webpages where there are some keywords, then in the CSS i made the DIV to be invisible. so basically, the HTML looks like at the beginning of the page there are a few keywords, and it is black text against white background. regular. so will they find out its invisible by reading the CSS?

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums movezig!

Why would you want to put your website at risk doing that? All you have to do is write "visible" content on your page that your visitors "want" to read. No need to try to trick the engines. It does not matter if they can read css or not, you are still spamming the engines by hiding words like that.

If they can read it, it's spam and you could be penalized.
If they can't read it, it's spam and you could be penalized.

Hope that helps.

[chrishirst]

movezig. Welcome to the forums.

if the engines read CSS or not doesn't matter. what you are doing is against the guidelines.

So why risk your site long term for a short term gain. If the text belongs on the page, make it visible. If it doesn't leave it off!.


[edit]
beaten to it by the boss,

moral, don't answer the phone while typing out an answer.
[/edit]

[movezig]

the reason i put it in there is coz the content is kinda low, and it was hard to try to fit all the keywords into the content. but i took it off anyways when i found out it was a bad idea. i guess i need to try to rewrite the content and expound as much as i can.

[chrishirst]

you don't have to use ALL your keywords on the one page, more pages, 2 phrases per page (max 3) will do better than trying to stuff the home page with lots of phrases.

[GujuWebMaster]

Welcome to the forums movezig!

It's a bad practice or spam.

you don't have to use ALL your keywords on the one page, more pages, 2 phrases per page (max 3) will do better than trying to stuff the home page with lots of phrases.
by - chrishirst

Agreed with Chris.
Also, try to get some more fresh content. It'll help.

thanks

[movezig]

thanks. so i should try to use three specific keywords often on each page. i heard 3-7% density from a couple places.

[Blue]

There's a recurring theme here in your posts movezig, which is that you are concerning yourself with writing pages for search engines.

Rather, ponder this:

Who is more important, the search engines or your sites visitors?

Granted, you may need the search engines so that your visitors can find your site, but, if you consider your visitors first, writing unique content that will be valuable to them, the search engines will eventually see this (as will others that will wish to link to your site) and that is when your hard work will pay off, for your visitors, the search engines, and you.

So, while you shouldn't ignore stuff like keyword density and other SEO techniques, you should look at it from the POV of your visitors first, with SEO in mind for when you implement what you've come up with.

[seo_max]

Originally posted by chrishirst
you don't have to use ALL your keywords on the one page, more pages, 2 phrases per page (max 3) will do better than trying to stuff the home page with lots of phrases.

best suggestion in my openion