Designing and building a web page can be hard enough as it is, but when you have to have search engine optimization in mind while doing it you can potentially run into some problems. Because of the need to rank well on Google, you can argue that they at least indirectly dictate how websites should be built. Fun things like flash that you used to see before have all but disappeared because of their lack of crawl-ability.

Luckily Google has recently been nice enough to provide web designers, and developers with a guide to HTML and CSS that will help you optimize your site.
Our HTML and CSS Style Guide, just like other Google style guides, deals with a lot of formatting-related matters. It also hints at best practices so to encourage developers to go beyond indentation. Many style guide authors know the underlying motivation from the question whether to describe the code they write—or to prescribe what code they want to write. Not surprisingly then, in our HTML and CSS style guide you’ll find both (as much as you’ll still find a lot of different development styles in our not entirely small code base).

Google doesn’t go into much detail about some of their suggestions in the guide. They did mention that they “hope to share more about their design decisions and future updates with you” but I’m not holding my breath. If you want to follow Google’s structure and styling suggestions blindly, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did, the guide is at least fairly easy to follow.

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