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Tutorial for converting to CSS tableless

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 8:01 am
by mjseaden
Hi,

Can anyone recommend an excellent tutorial for converting your crowded HTML TABLE based pages to tableless CSS pages which are far easier for the search engines to make sense of.

Many thanks

Mark

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 8:21 am
by onion2k
Theres lots of good reasons to convert to using CSS, but search engines isn't one of them. Search engines strip out all the HTML before they process your site.. whether you've got divs or td tags.. no different. They take note of things like h1 tags, but you should have them in even if you're using a table layout.

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 8:53 am
by Roja
onion2k wrote:Theres lots of good reasons to convert to using CSS, but search engines isn't one of them. Search engines strip out all the HTML before they process your site.. whether you've got divs or td tags.. no different. They take note of things like h1 tags, but you should have them in even if you're using a table layout.
Thats actually not entirely accurate.

The search engines do not strip the html before, or even during processing. In fact, both MSN and Google explicitly consider parts of the html: Google checks rel=nofollow links, and MSN checks meta tags.

In both cases, thats impossible if they stripped the html, so thats put to rest. :)

As to whether it can help with search engines, possibly. *Any* logical design with a clean structure, solid layout, and html compatible code will help versus a design that doesn't have those things.

All things being equal, if you take a "perfectly" designed css-only site and a "perfectly" designed html site, and run them both through google and MSN, you'll get pretty much the same result.

So, make the focus a clean design. Use proper structure - h1's for headings, h2's for subheadings. Code in proper html compliance. Make sure you have alt tags for all images.

But most important for SEO'ing, have good content. Then the links will come, and you'll be all set.