Search Engines

Which of the following is most recommended?

[Enigmatic]

First of all, I want to apologize if I'm posting this in the wrong forum. I didn't know where else to post this question.

Anyway, my question is the following. There are three ways I can think of to make a text graphic with a border. Which of the following is considered the most favorable according to search engines?

1. Using CSS and a table to create a border around text with a background. Coding as follows:

.border3 { border: 1px solid #FFC45A;padding: 0;background: url(HRC_Scanlines.gif)}

2. Using a graphic made with photoshop showing the same thing but without the table.

3. Using what I guess are called "boxes" with the following code, which don't use tables:

<div style="width:160px;text-align:center;padding:2px;background: url(HRC_Scanlines.gif);border: 1px solid #FFC45A;font-size:10pt;">Main Menu
</div>

Now all of these achieve the same goal, but which one is the most SE compatible? I know building too many tables is bad, because it throws content further down on the page for SE's. But images don't get indexed (except maybe the ALT tag for some SE's) and the "box" method adds a lot of additional coding. Thus I'm kind of stumped as to which way is the best. Any suggestions?

Enigmatic

[varya]

I use <div id="x"> and then I put all the css coding in a separate style sheet.

[Enigmatic]

Could you show me what the coding for this would look like according to my examples? Thanks,

Enigmatic

[Llama]

For his method:
in your head:
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

in your body:
<div style="x">Main Menu
</div>

in your style.css (or whatever you name it):
#x { width:160px;text-align:center;padding:2px;background: url(HRC_Scanlines.gif);border: 1px solid #FFC45A;font-size:10pt; }

[varya]

In the head of the document:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

In the body:
<div id="menu">
Main Menu
</div>

In the stylesheet (which would be named style.css)

#menu { width:160px;
text-align:center;
padding:2px;
background: url(HRC_Scanlines.gif);
border: 1px solid #FFC45A;
font-size:10pt; }