Is table-less worthless?

[janeth]

Originally Posted by weslinda

Isn't the ability to rearrange content within the code a benefit from an SEO standpoint? As you are able to move the most relevant content to the top of your code?

Yes but it is not enough help to move you up when trying to rank for a competitive keyword.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by weslinda

Isn't the ability to rearrange content within the code a benefit from an SEO standpoint? As you are able to move the most relevant content to the top of your code?

Yes, and styling is separated from content in external files.

1. Much easier to read.
2. Much easier to modify.
3. Much easier to reuse.
4. Increased usability and accessibility. More traffic.

I am sure that all these indirect effects are very important for SEO.

[janeth]

I have Maria doing a little research and she will post what she finds in just a minute but here was something I thought was interesting.

She said most of the sites ranking in Google use tables but most of the sites ranking in Yahoo do not.

I just thought that was interesting.

Google does not add any weight for being W3C compliant or using table-less designs. But it does help although very, very little in the fact that you can move the content to the top of the page.

But does Yahoo give a ranking boost for table-less designs and being W3C compliant?

[kgun]

Originally Posted by janeth

I have Maria doing a little research and she will post what she finds in just a minute but here was something I thought was interesting.

Janeth, you know my attitude to such research, especially when it is done in a minute.

The time horizon for a serious project should at least be more than 6 months.

SERP position in Google is more than tossing a dice in a minute and loosely conclude that the probability of hitting a 6 is 1/6.

Especially the indirect SEO benefits I am talking about may take long time to mature.

[inertia]

epoch

[Dubbya]

weslinda said:
Isn't the ability to rearrange content within the code a benefit from an SEO standpoint? As you are able to move the most relevant content to the top of your code?

That's EXACTLY right.

CSS layouts allow you to take advantage of the "Top Down" method that SE's use to scan your code.

Using the "Any Order Columns" method, you can order the content in your code thus placing the content early in the source code so that the SE's read it first. You then use CSS to position the Div's into your layout as the browser renders the page.

Here's a pretty good example of how it's done:
How to optimize your website layout to ensure your content is the first one in the page

[inertia]

P.S. Day and night="Døgn" in Norwegian. Any single English word for day and night?

Epoch?

[Urbanxtremes]

Originally Posted by kgun

Urbanxtremes: Interesting arguments.

May be a side note. Did you read my post at the top of this page regarding XML. You can use CSS and XSL(T) to style XML documents. What is your opinion of pure XML driven sites? Do you think that is the next wave?

I did indeed read your post, and could not agree more. XML documents can provide many advantages. If you create a well styled RSS feed, then you can start gaining advantages of the Search Feeders. I don’t really have much time to spend writing a blog, but decided to do a trial and test the effectiveness of them. So, I took one of the shelf and started playing around with it. I wrote a few articles and general stuff. Then started working on the SE and Feeders, now this blog has no external linking in or any SE rankings. So it is pretty much hidden. After loading content the site started receiving traffic. The blog has been live since 25/10/07 and from zero unique visitors the traffic has risen to 80 unique per-day. OK, nothing to write home about. But, that is not a bad rise in what is effectively 14 day old site. My point is that; looking at the stats of the blog I can see the following, which are separate from the 80 unique visitors: On the 08/11/07 the blog received 39 feeder spider hits and 11 SE Spiders. This has been a steady rise from the date the blog was built. From this short experiment I am now writing an application to convert my personal news site database to create an XML feed for its specific news section. This should generate a considerable more amount of traffic. So yes, XML is very important.

Originally Posted by janeth

So it will hurt your site, not help it.

I am not a designer but I am wondering why the page names will need to change?

Most large companies use specific CMS systems, and rebuilding a site does not necessarily follow the same database tables that the present site has, hence, and a new database would have to be written to accommodate the new site. This would mean that all the present URLs would be effectively redundant. Thus, affecting your ranking as the links will be broken.

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Just curious: Does your hosting company provide you unlimited brandwidth?

The company I work for does have unlimited bandwidth; not only that but has to have unlimited space as well. Under FSA rules, everyday the site has too be duplicated and saved for six years… Now that is a bloody nightmare.

Originally Posted by MuNKyonline

I think you have exaggerated quite a lot here on the costs for developing a website in CSS compared to tables. I dont know of any companies anywhere that would charge something like that for one page lol. You must be looking in the wrong places if you're getting quotes like that!

Tables would take far longer to load, as BJ has pointed out, increasing the bandwidth usage.

If anything, I can create an accessible website in CSS/XHTML far more quickly than I could when I built websites in just tables controlled by CSS. So my labour expenses are less.

I am not the one exaggerating, I am the one complaining... If I had my way, I would build it myself... But then I don't hold the SLA with that development company. That figure is not a cost for frontend work, that is what I have to do. They are the backend guys.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

John, it was a joke, funny misspelling. If you should start to correct my English, you would have to have more than 24 hours a day and night.

I know that man. I was just kidding.

[kgun]

So you fooled me

But you work 37 hours a day and night (epoch)?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by janeth

I have Maria doing a little research and she will post what she finds in just a minute but here was something I thought was interesting.

She said most of the sites ranking in Google use tables but most of the sites ranking in Yahoo do not.

I just thought that was interesting.

Google does not add any weight for being W3C compliant or using table-less designs. But it does help although very, very little in the fact that you can move the content to the top of the page.

But does Yahoo give a ranking boost for table-less designs and being W3C compliant?

I think here is a point we can start with: YUI Theater — Shawn Henry: “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Update” » Yahoo! User Interface Blog

About accessibility & validation see my following post.

[Webnauts]

Old news but ...: Google, AOL, Yahoo improve service for the blind

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guideline 3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly.
Mark up documents with the proper structural elements. Control presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements and attributes.
More: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Also see this:

Appendix A. -- Validation
Validate accessibility with automatic tools and human review. Automated methods are generally rapid and convenient but cannot identify all accessibility issues. Human review can help ensure clarity of language and ease of navigation.
Begin using validation methods at the earliest stages of development. Accessibility issues identified early are easier to correct and avoid.
...
2. Validate syntax (e.g., HTML, XML, etc.).
3. Validate style sheets (e.g., CSS).
...
More: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

Of course you are correct. I will not listen to the spaghetti coders, but

1. Time
2. Third party providers of code

are limiting / restriciting inputs to digital production. So I have to use spagetthi code since my sites are ad driven. That makes me overall sloppy on these sites.

I prefer to give up my business before I outsource my coding needs to spaghetti coders.

Originally Posted by kgun

1. John I have to leave now, to debug my computer.

Good idea Kjell. If I had time I would have done that too. But .... you know....

Originally Posted by kgun

I can tell you my personal opinion. Of course there is a relationship between SEO, accessibility, usability, technology and presentation.

I told you man! We are on the same boat.

Originally Posted by kgun

I know why your pages have higher Tb PR than most of the people posting on this forum.

Do I? Hm, to be honest I did not notice. Actually I do not look what others do and how they do things, as you already know.
I do not want to forget what I learned, or go further back in the past. I am suffering enough landing in the 21st century.

Originally Posted by kgun

Read my posts along or between the lines above.

1. Start using XML and much of the problems disappear. The documents have to be well-formed. Hokus Pokus.

Step by step man. In long terms I am thinking of moving to XSLT. It is just a matter of time. At least my sites feeds are RDF. Is that ok so far?

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

At least my sites feeds are RDF. Is that ok so far?

Part of the XML family.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by Dubbya

That's EXACTLY right.

CSS layouts allow you to take advantage of the "Top Down" method that SE's use to scan your code.

Using the "Any Order Columns" method, you can order the content in your code thus placing the content early in the source code so that the SE's read it first. You then use CSS to position the Div's into your layout as the browser renders the page.

Here's a pretty good example of how it's done:
How to optimize your website layout to ensure your content is the first one in the page

I guess my site is a better example.

See how the engines see it: Search Engine Optimization Company - SEO Workers

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

So you fooled me

But you work 37 hours a day and night (epoch)?

If you make a search of my posts here, and look at the times of the posts, you will realize that I am not kidding.

Try that out.

[Dubbya]

webnauts said:
I guess my site is a better example

Yep... U da MAN!!

[httpman]

So many words, so little time...
Did anyone here try to write a html page for e-mailing, instead of writing pure text lines for WebProWorld ?
I guess most tableless designer did not - just because CSS does not work within outlook 2007. We at Net-Createurs work both on websites AND html e-mail - and outlook 2007 compliant e-mails are becoming an increasing part of our business since a few months, guess why ?
Whatever could purists think, from their bedroom, in the real world only efficiency brings success. Tables design or div into div into div design, both are 100% W3C compliant or am I wrong ?
The only difference I can see in pure CSS (div into div into div...) design is like completing a Sudoku puzzle : no realy a need, but pleasant because not so easy !

[weslinda]

CSS does work within Outlook 2007 and they even provide an HTML and CSS validation tool to check your work within Outlook. While the capabilities are not browser perfect, there are capabilities though.

Organization of an email carries a much different weight than a web site. No need to manipulate content organization for search engine optimization within an email.

We've listed numerous reasons for CSS and tableless and none of them were to make ourselves feel better, or more proud about putting a "puzzle" together.

Regarding production of a site versus emails, if you want to change an email template, you only change that template, you don't have 4000 other pages to worry about the template issues on. With the web template you have to worry about the content organization across all pages.

Comparing email design to web site design can't really be put into the same categories of importance.

[httpman]

Originally Posted by weslinda

Comparing email design to web site design can't really be put into the same categories of importance.

Why not ? We manage websites with thousand of pages, up to 4 languages, and changing anything in the core design is just one click ahead as we use a nice template oriented tool : just change the core template, click on a button and the whole website is updated.

E-mails are much harder to work around, because to see them as a real user you have to send it to yourself - and it takes time. And users can look at it within Outlook, or Entourage on the Mac, or Gmail which is worst yet (from a CSS point of vue).

And no : Outlook 2007 is NOT CSS compliant. W3C validated pages does almost never display fine in Outlook, as it uses Word engine to render HTML - this is a well known issue, and IS the main reason why Microsoft provides its own validator !

[bj]

Did anyone here try to write a html page for e-mailing, instead of writing pure text lines for WebProWorld ?
I guess most tableless designer did not - just because CSS does not work within outlook 2007.

Apples and oranges. Webpages are a totally different thing from html email. And assuming none of us know that and that none of us has worked with both is ignorant. I do both sorts of work with no problem. Of course, I've taken the time to learn both.

Just because you have to write monkey code for html email doesn't mean it's acceptable for webpages. It isn't.

we use a nice template oriented tool : just change the core template, click on a button and the whole website is updated.

Wow, you are behind the times. Static html? geez. I didn't know people still managed websites that way.

[kgun]

Read this today that I will share with you.

"In later chapters, I'll go into plenty of detail on both CSS and XSLT, but I wanted to make a brief point here. Because we've taken the time to create XML documents, our information is no longer locked up inside proprietary formats such as word processors. Furhtermore, it no konger has to be "re-created" every time you want to create alternative displays of information: all you have to do is create a style sheet or transformation to make your XML presentation in a given medium.

.........................

As you ca see, separating information from presentations makes your XML documents reusable, and can hassles and headaches in environments in which a lot of information needs to be stores, processed, handled and exchanged."

Source: Thomas Meyer (april 2006 version): "No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP" page 12-13.

Example of an XML document.

Note how the dynamic XML tags give meaning to the content compared to the static HTML tags.

[InkodeR]

Originally Posted by tamecrow

. Tableless design gives less code bloat and makes it easier to read through the code but there's no real SEO benefit...

I can think of a HUGE SEO benefit using CSS vs tableless designs.

But I'll keep it to myself till I've finished testing.

When testing is over I'll post.

[kgun]

I made this

XML driven site: Read here

summary post for those that will go directly to XML and XSLT.

There are things that can not be done with CSS, that can be done with XSLT, though it take some time to learn XSLT. In additon to being a stylesheet transformation, XSLT is a rule based or functional language, a subset of XSL.

It is very easy to transform an XML document to HTML or XHTML. If you are used to CSS, that can be useed as the style sheet language for your files. See the examples in the third link, more precisely:

Web browsers and various tagging formats.

[jtracking]

Originally Posted by InkodeR

I can think of a HUGE SEO benefit using CSS vs tableless designs.

But I'll keep it to myself till I've finished testing.

When testing is over I'll post.

How's the testing coming?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by InkodeR

I can think of a HUGE SEO benefit using CSS vs tableless designs.

But I'll keep it to myself till I've finished testing.

When testing is over I'll post.

CSS vs tableless is not the major benefit alone. It also heavily depends on the code semantical structure. I hope you are aware of that so we can get the best out of your test.

[Webnauts]

Kgun I mentioned before and elsewhere that tables are for tabular data presentation, and it is correct implementing them, but only for that purpose.