CSS Formatting for SEO

[grant]

I'm beginning to build sites entirely in CSS, which is to say, with no tables, just entirely positioning content with CSS.

The theory I've heard is that SEs see more content than tables, cells, etc. and thus content is presented in a cleaner and easier to read format.

Have any of you used CSS for SEO, and have you seen evidence of improved results (in the SERPs)?

[oberon]

yes, mi CSS-P designed sites are always in the top results. Recently my girlfriend redesigned her private site from a table-based structure to full CSS positionning and structural markup, her site jumped from google depths to the first page for the same keywords one week later (without any new content).

[Daily Sparring]

If that isn't a good enough reason to switch, I don't know what is..... Now if I could just learn CSS. Any good tutorial sites (free) and maybe some scripts etc... Sticky me if you can't use the url.

[photon]

You can start right here with Nick_W's crash course [webmasterworld.com].

[Eric_Jarvis]

when I shifted across to css with a large scale site in a competitive field we went from 23rd on a single word term with 3 million results up to 11th within a month...we also went from 2nd to 1st on several two word terms

it works

[KS_Katz]

I've done very well with CSS formatting. Sitepoint has an excellent book on it.

[Enigmatic]

Do not get Sitepoint's CSS book. I repeat, do not get Sitepoint's CSS book. I looked at this post and then visited Sitepoint. I then decided to see how it was ranked on Amazon.com. Nearly everyone gave it terrible reviews saying it had nothing to do with the title. Buyer beware. You can check it out for yourself and confirm my information.

[grant]

There are online tutorials that are great, don't spend money on books. Stickey me if you want those URLs.

[drbrain]

While I have read neither Dan Shafer's, Eric Meyer's, nor any other CSS author's books, there is one really easy way to determine which CSS books you should buy.

Go to the author's home page and see how much CSS, and how many <table>s they have.

Resize the pages to see how well they reflow. Are they fluid?

Do they look good?

If you can't make any sense out of them, or they don't look clean, or they use tables (no matter how much they apologize), you probably shouldn't buy their books.