Hello Blogosphere....

As promised yesterday, here is the next installment of my SEO Guide to website construction. Go read part 1 first if you missed it!

Todays topic on website construction is DIVs + CSS.

Now, I have actually seen a fair few Web Designer's company websites (who offer SEO as a service) that say that having constructed a website from tables (the old school method) means that your website will not rank in a search engine.

This is rubbish. I wouldn't be surprised there are still more sites made using tables for construction than anything else on the web, although DIV's and CSS should be rapidly catching up.

In my opinion, these people are shooting themselves in the foot. I will go on to explain why DIV's and CSS are preferable to tables, but there is still plenty of work that can be done that will make a table designed website rank better in search engines and get more traffic to this site.

Even a year ago when I was touching upon learning web design at University, they were still teaching website construction utilising tables.

Really we do want to steer away from tables nowadays, but mainly because it really beefs up your code, and makes it much harder to manage, and importantly, it gives search engine spiders more irrelevant information to read before it gets to the good stuff (the content).

It really is much easier to keep your content (HTML) and style (CSS)seperate. A div layout is preferable over tables, for example, as tables require their layout information to be on each individual HTML page.

Also keyword rich content can get too deeply nested within the table structure, when we want it to be easily accessible to search engine spiders.

Some people believe that the most important copy on a web page should be located as near to the top of that page as possible - DIV layout makes this easier to achieve.

In addition to this, CSS is more cross-browser friendly which is an important usability consideration.

Thats the end of todays entry in the SEO Guide to Website Construction. There is plenty more to come in what I am planning as a series, so keep out a watchful eye for part 3!