Magic SEO URL for phpBB

Why are the templates with CSS layout better for SEO?

There are many reasons to start using CSS layout - not only from aspects of SEO. If you are in doubt why to use CSS layout on your board, please read the following small tutorial.


Reasons for CSS layout from the user's view:

  • pages are rendered much more faster
    - less code (less data to transfer)
    - improve the speed on webservers with high server load
    - improve the speed on slow lines
  • table based layouts are rendered very slowly
    - user's browser need to wait on the end of each table to show it

Reasons for CSS layout from the coder's view:

  • structured code
    - well-arranged code
  • change in one place
    - save your/coder's time
  • not necessary to modify direct (X)HTML

Reasons for CSS layout from the SEO's view:

  • less code
    - search engines reward condensed content
    - it helps search engines better target your web page for specific keywords
  • different order of content in the code and on the page
    - logical look in linear browesers (such as lynx)
  • valid and clean (X)HTML code

As you can see, CSS layout has many benefits for users, coders and for SEO of course. For this reason, we always recommend to use CSS layout (table-less - if possible) in templates instead of table based layouts.
Unfortunately there are only few (free) available phpBB templates using CSS layout. More information can be found in tip Where to find templates with CSS layout?.