External Style Sheets Are a Must for Fast-Loading, Well-Designed, Flexible Web Sites
When I get a new webmaster as a client, the first thing I suggest is to let me to switch the site over to an external cascading style sheet (CSS for short).
There are many reasons for this, beyond loading faster and taking up less resources. It makes the pages less cluttered with tags and lets search engine spiders really cruise through a site.
The page you're looking at right now is a tableless CSS designed web site that loads fast and is geared towards making the search engines happy from a technical point of view.
Now, you might not think that page size matters much to search engines but remember, to get to your internal links they have to "read" your whole site. If your page is smaller they can do more crawling before the resources they have allocated for your site are exhausted.
Style sheets and clean code are a must for good readability and keeping the
search engines happy.