SEO Tables Trick

Here's a very common layout for a website:

Looks OK, doesn't it? The problem is what you want and what the search engines are going to do are two very different things. The higher up a page the real content is, the better that page is likely to rank for the keywords in the content.

You should, of course, put some keywords into the "alt" tag.

The trouble is that search engines, when "spidering" a web page built inside a table, start with the left-hand column and then move on to other columns. So in the example above, the table of contents and the links, appear, to the search engine, to be higher up the page (i.e. more important) than the content. This is what the HTML looks like for that table:

<table width="450" border="1" align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1">
<tr>
<td colspan="2">Banner and Alt Text here - with keywords </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="122">
<p>Table of Contents</p>
<ul>
<li>Link 1</li>
<li>Link 2</li>   <- This gets indexed first (after the alt text)
<li>Link 3</li>
<li>etc </li>
</ul>
</td>
<td width="311" valign="top">
<p>Main Content.</p>
<p>Here's where your content goes. This is what
you really want to get indexed by the search
engines </p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

A Simple Solution

It's quite possible to build websites without using tables, yet having a similar appearance to a site set in a table. This is done using "CSS" (Cascading Style Sheet) coding. This is certainly the best method, and you can use CSS to push the main content to the top of the page, as far as the search engines are concerned.

However, there is a simpler solution, and you can use it to "fix" an existing website, if it has the simple structure set out above. All you do is to insert a separate row at the top of the left-hand column, like this:

Let's have a look at the HTML for that table:

<table width="450" border="1" align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1">
<tr>
<td colspan="2">Banner and Alt Text here - with keywords </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="124">&nbsp;
</td>
<td width="309" rowspan="2" valign="top">
<p>Main Content.</p>    <- All this gets indexed first
<p>Here's where your content goes. This is what
you really want to get indexed by the search
engines </p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p>Table of Contents</p>
<ul>
<li>Link 1</li>
<li>Link 2</li>
<li>Link 3</li>
<li>etc</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Can you see the difference? Now the search engines will see that your main content is higher up the page. And the empty row above your navigation bar will hardly make any difference to the appearance of the page, especially if you remove the non-breaking space element: "&nbsp;".

If you want to see what your website looks like in a seaarch engine's "eyes", use this handy online tool.

I hope that you found this little trick useful, and that it will help to drive your website up the search engines rankings.