Until a couple of years ago, it seemed rather commonplace to design fancy web layouts with the aid of the HTML "tables". Whilst this often achieved the intended result (a nice looking website) from the visitors point of view, it was an absolute nightmare from the point of view of a search engine. Let me explain why.

Tables are meant solely for formatting the layout of tabular data, not for complete web layouts. If the data you're putting into the table isn't intended to sit in nicely formatted rows and columns for easy consumption by the user, it's likely your data was ever intended to be entered within a table to begin with.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the medium intended to be used for the overall styling of a website layout, and they have many advantages over the use of tables.

The foremost advantage is that CSS separates the layout or style information from the actual content. As many web browsers download the content before applying the style, this generally results in a faster and more streamlined page loading experience for the visitor.

In addition, search engines like Google have little interest in how your website looks; their only real interest is in the content you provide. For that reason, Google doesn't want to download all the style information associated with your website. Not only would doing so mean the use of more of your bandwidth every time Google's crawler robots visit your site, it'd make it harder for Google to effectively establish and sort through your content.

Picture this: if you were asked to find a needle (the content) in a haystack (a mess of table tags), you'd get rather frustrated. If the needle was seperated from the haystack, you'd have a much more pleasant experience, and get the whole ordeal over with in a much faster period of time. This would likely result in you looking more favourably upon the person who set you the task to do. It makes sense, right?

Well, that is no different with search engines. If you want them to like you, play by the guidelines and you will be favoured over those that do not.


About the Author

Article by Michael Derbyshire. Michael enjoys writing on a number of topics, and maintains a number of websites. For information on some of the highest quality binoculars in the world, check out Carl Zeiss Binoculars.