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Just validate the html first and all should be good.
Zuko
Since your much better than me at tables, have you ever seen a case where a site had such bad design problems with the tables that it actually sort of prevented Google or any other SE from indexing the site in any way?
I'd be curious to find out from the "table expert" himself
:-)
SEO
Visit the CSS forum to find lots of people who try to replace tables with divs to reduce page size and get their content to the top of the HTML. Do a site search on "table trick" to find out about how to get your right-column content listed higher in the HTML than your left-column content. Higher in the HTML = better for ranking.
[edited by: John_Caius at 4:33 pm (utc) on April 24, 2003]
Make sure it validates. forgetting a TR or TD or mising up a /TD or TD can make it look fine in IE but may turn up a blank page in other browsers. Dont know how that affects spidering though.
Rule of thumb, the less code as a paercentage of page weight the better.
If you viewed your page in NEtscape 4.x and half or all of the page was missing, then that would probably mean that the page's html was not correct. Most of the time (for me at least) it meant that my table tags were not correct i.e. missing closing tags.
ex: <table>
<tr>
<td>
</tr>
</table>
missing closing table data element tag: </td>
Spiders would not index these sites, because they did not know where the copy body started and stopped. If you looked at that example in IE, with content of course, it would appear just fine, and spiders are getting better at this.
Also, directories like DMOZ and Yahoo editors will scrutinize your site and might tell you to go back and fix your mess(....at lest I've heard :) )
My ghetto way of validating html and table tags is just breaking out the Netscrape 4.x browser and seeing if everything was cool. IF so, then you're ready for the spiders, otherwise go back to the notepad. There's various free online tools as well to do the same.
P.S. I know homesite was purchased by macromedia and is now included in the dreamweaver, blah, blah, blah.... It just seems like to get a chair to sit in, I had to buy a house that had the chair in it. I'm not bitter, not at all...
Zuko
There are two replies that pose a good argument and here's where I stand on it.
Tables, higher content, lower content has never been a concern of mine. And has never limited me to achieving #1. It might have been, 1 year ago though. I can list a number of sites that are #1 for competitive keywords that aren't even in the body copy. Keep link text in mind for trying to get ranked for keywords.
Keep good site quality in mind: navigation is always a concern if you want to retain visitors, good content at the top and at the bottom, and lots of animated gifs! (just kidding on that last one).
Remember the search engine is the first doorway for your users to get to your site. After that, if your users like it they will come back, (not through the search engine), and use it for whatever you were offering the first time.
Basically don't sacrifice quality and good design for trying to get your <h1> keywords at the top of the site. Besides you look like a spammer if you do.
Don't look like a spammer...
In my experience the single most important factor affecting ranking is inbound link anchor text, closely followed by title text. But if you can code your page more optimally and still have it looking the same then why not?
