SEO Tip of the Day: Lose the Tables

Tables have long been abused and used to create the way a page is viewed. Typically this means that your navigation menu on the side of your page appears to be the first content to a search engine spider.

Your main body text may end up so far down the page that GoogleBot thinks many of your pages are the same, which is no good. With the div tag and CSS you can actually make it so the menu on your page is AFTER the main body of content in the html, which will dramatically help each of your pages appear to be different (they ARE actually different, right?)

• Another benefit of replacing your tables with div’s is that your CSS file only has to be loaded once, so it saves you bandwidth because each individual page is smaller.
• I’ve also heard that your pages will render faster since your browser doesn’t have to wait for the entire table to download before it can start drawing.
• Easy layout changes. With CSS you can move stuff around, change the size,color, whatever without having to mess with your html.

Moving away from tables can take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it you won’t go back!

~Wealthy Webmaster