Technical level: Basic/Beginner || Date: 18th April 2004 || Author: Nigel Peck
This article is based on part of a larger book 'Website Findability' by Michael Heraghty.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to separate the stylistic elements of a page such as layout, colour and fonts from the content of the page such as paragraphs and images. We call this Separation of Content from Presentation.
If you don't understand CSS at all then you may decide not to use it for your site. However I would suggest that the advantages to be gained from using CSS, not just for Google, are well worth the time invested in learning it. For an introduction to CSS see CSS Is Easy by Kevin Yank or see the many other quality articles over at SitePoint's CSS Section.