Tables to CSS - Worth It?

Discussion on whether a content-heavy site will benefit from CSS redo

[trnelson]

Can anyone offer any experiences on converting a table-based site to CSS. I have such a site and it does pretty well for SEO and AdSense. I realize it's just a drop in the bucket compared to many here, but considering the type of site it is, it got just shy of 30k uniques in August and about 150k page views. In a good month I will make about $150-225 in AdSense. Ads are not on all pages. PR of 5 for home page. It's a seasonal site that does very well in July - Sept, but otherwise it does about half of the above numbers.

AdSense was an afterthought, so the placement of the ads could be much better. I have gotten quite good at coding CSS for SEO now and I see a huge potential to improve traffic to the site by doing so, but is this a fair expectation? The site has a lot of content which is driving the traffic, and I really don't have that many links. I'm sure that by redesigning/coding I'll improve both of those.

Should I be worried about such a big change regarding my users and their experience on the site?
Most importantly, what should I expect to see with search traffic? (I estimate maybe a dip but then a good recovery and an increase in traffic overall)
Currently the site has very few ads. Am I going to really turn off users by integrating ads in a stronger way, and on all pages?

A lot of work has gone into the site in the last 3-4 years and I'd like to better monetize it. Maybe I'm just waiting for someone to give me the go ahead and say "do it!" ;)

Any comments or suggestions anyone can offer I'd love to hear. Thanks very much!

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I have done this with a couple of sites in the past and in my experience you should not expect a dramatic change in traffic. You will probably see some improvement but you should not see any dip.

[trnelson]

Thanks beebee,

Did you notice a trend at all where traffic significantly benefited, or a change in the way your pages worked with search engines? I'm still learning how search engines work with the semantics of code and source-ordered content. Did you notice if you received more traffic, or more relevant traffic, or both?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I didn't actually notice anything significant other than a slight increase in traffic. From memory I think this was about 10% but I don't really believe this is significant because there are so many other factors ivolved and all sites are different.