Does Cascading Style Sheets help search engine spiders index or maybe read your pages better and faster.
Also does having a table within a table affect how search engine spiders index your site?
Leandro
Leandro,
1) Using CSS will greatly reduce the amount of code necessary to control how your site is presented and it is best to use an external CSS file.
Search Engine spiders "see" the code the same way you do if you open the page in a text editor. They tend to give more weight to content closer to the top of the page (among a lot of other criteria), so removing as much code from the page as is practical is to your benefit, especially CSS and javascript in the headers.
Even if there were no benefit to SEO for using CSS, I would have to recommmend using style sheets, especially in external files. Being able to make changes to just one file for updating the look of an entire site is a real time saver!
2) Search Engines do find the content in nested tables. Keep in mind, the information closer to the top of the file (not the top of the web page) will be considered more important. If you are using tables to layout the page, and put navigation on the left in the first cell, you are giving more emphasis to the navigation than to the content.
A trick I picked up a few years back creates a blank cell first, then the page content in the second cell, set for rowspan of 2. After the end of the first row, the navigation is put into the first cell. Like this:
<table><tr>
<td height=1></td>
<td rowspan=2>[Main content of page here. Can be a nested table]</td>
</tr><tr>
<td>[left navigation here]</td>
</tr></table>
The above example is very simplistic and meant only to help you visualize what I said in the preceding paragraph.
I cannot claim authorship of this technique. Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of the web site, or the folks who did.
I hope this helps.
-Anita