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The ‘LINK’ Between SEO And Nested Tables
A Short ‘Nested Table’ Story: A friend of mine was getting his business website designed and asked me for advice. Knowing that I am an SEO expert, he wanted to take full advantage of my knowledge and experience, and I was happy to provide it. His web designer had suggested that they use nested tables as part of the website design and he was confused naturally, and, rightly so. As I explained to him, website architecture has a direct impact on the action of search engines. Your website architecture, or web site design in ‘layman terms’, is responsible for search engines to interpret the information available and decide whether it’s relevant or not.
Therefore, as I continued to explain the importance of Architecture to my friend, emphasizing the importance of getting things right in the beginning, so even the ’scoping’ phase becomes very important. Remember: SEO opportunities must be utilized when initially conceptualizing website design, it’s not something that should be an ‘afterthought’. After all, you wouldn’t like to redesign your website for SEO once you find out that your “cool looking” website design isn’t SEO friendly, would you? Trust me people; I have seen it happen, many times!
The rule of thumb here is: Search Engines don’t see your website pages the same way a human does. This one point is also the single most important criteria for designing a SEO friendly website. Your interpretation of this rule of thumb will determine the outcome of many of the decisions you make when get your website designed, need to give optimum performance and ranking in SERP or search engine results pages.
The search engine robots or spiders that crawl through your pages (i.e.: the googlebot) scan your pages according to the code and then break down this information to figure out the relevance of the page. Essentially, spiders are infamous for not scanning the entire page; they prefer to simply scan the first half of your web page. So, you should remember to put the most important information as close to the top of the page as possible. You must also make sure that you don’t lose the content within nested tables nor have it camouflaged in a chaotic structure that makes breaking it down next to impossible.
To be honest, I have realized that many website designers love to use tables as part of website design. For the designers, using 3-4 tables helps in the page layout. But, there is a catch. The search engine spiders don’t like tables, especially nested tables. Why? Because, these spiders tend to get lost in the tables and sometimes even give up on these pages altogether without trying! Even if the spiders do find the information, they tend to believe that it is too deeply nested to have any importance at all. Additionally, using nested tables in website design tend to pull down the visibility of the content and waste space at the top of the code, which is a tragedy, because that’s what most search spiders are interested in anyways!
Many SEO experts, like yours truly, also believe that nested tables are one of the leading causes of slow pages. So, my final advice to you is to use CSS that works just as well.
By Jeremy Hermanns | July 8, 2008 | Filed Under SEO Advice
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