SEO and tableless design

[UCSI]

Can you show us some site statistics? Does she get traffic from her Google AdWords campaigns?

Look at your stats and find out when the site visitor abandons the site - it sounds to me the site is not user friendly and/or doesn't bring the message across to generate leads or sales.

Sure - table less design is great - most of our sites are now table less and also validate - but that's just and added plus and doesn't help much with the SEO side of things. Just with clean code and looking ahead of the coding trend...it doesn't hurt your SEO either

You can always improve on the SEO (yes - Dreamweaver works just fine - but any tool is only as good as the person using it), but her problem seems to be the usability and marketing message itself - I don't think hiring an SEO company at this point will help her to convert visitors into sales unless the SEO also does a site usability and marketing analysis and suggests some redesign...

JM2C worth

Good luck!

[leadegroot]

Well, apart from an icky 'thats what I do' , perhaps a job ad on the WSG forums (forum.webstandardsgroup.org)?
They are standards-compliant folk, and those who know SEO might respond.
(Disclaimer: I'm a mod there, but I'm too busy to respond to an ad myself)

[Orion]

BossWebmaster, valid code on it's own doesn't have SEO benefit, however invalid code can and often does hurt the ability of a search spider from reading the site thus the benefit of valid code. If an engine can't spider the site because of bad coding (or part of) then it wont' rank as well.

It's like tabless design doesn't give SEO benefit by itself but what it does do is it allows you to place the elements in an order on the page (text view..like a spider would read it) that has very powerful SEO benefits, and the CSS then can move those sections around and lay them out into an appealing design for the site visitor.

[phx-keith]

Yikes!!!! Find an SEO expert that can code in a text editor. One should be able to do SEO without having to change your layout or use Dreamweaver.

I like to validate my pages just in case.

As for CSS layout Vs. Tables.... Might be true that CSS layouts out perform table Layouts when it comes to SEO, however I think there are more important aspects to SEO such as getting good quality inbound links and good quality content.

[suzstephens]

Dreamweaver includes a perfectly fine text editor.

[prof611]

Wow! I'm overwhelmed. Last night when I went to bed, there were 3 replies, and now I find there are 21! Thank you for your input. I can't respond to all of you, but I feel that I need to clarify some things anyway.

First, I didn't mean to reignite the old debate between CSS Tableless designs and old-school and/or WYSIWYG design. I obviously happen to belong in the first category, but that's not material to my original inquiry. In any case, it appears to me that tabula_rasa has indeed done some research on the SEO value of tableless design (forum #54045) and shown it to improve ranking.

Secondly, while I have no desire to become familiar with Dreamweaver, I note from your replies that it would be possible to use it without invalidating the code. However, the local SEO "expert" in question would most likely not know how to do this. She doesn't even use a DOCTYPE heading in her own websites.

Finally, I know that it's difficult for any of you to help specifically without being able to inspect the site in question. I certainly would appreciate any concrete suggestions. The website is Simple Island Weddings - Virgin Island Weddings Made Simple .

[schachin]

NOTE: I would say one of the first things you would look at is the title tag on the home page.. if you type in simple island wedding it comes up first in the results, so it is ranking for what the title is saying it is.. a title tag should be keyword rich with the most important kw's being in the front of the title and if you have to put the company name put it at the back after the 66 char mark, so it is not considered in the title keywords - title is one of the MOST important factors in SEO.. start there and w your meta tags and header tags and you will probably see some change if you work on your IBL at the same time

Also I code and do SEO as do many others.. it is possible to find someone that does both or if not someone who does one with someone who can do the other..

hope this helps!

[datetopia]

Having content in valid HTML is not a target itself. A website basicly needs some key html content relevant to search engines and good link popularity. The main part of the website should be dedicated to the website users. That why there are many successful sites that have most content invisible to search engines (flash sites, member sites) .

[darren13]

Personally, I'd love to redesign my entire site using CSS as much as possible, make it accessible as possible, and have a lot more errors than I do now when using validators such as the W3C thingy.

But - our site does bring in traffic. I've checked it across a few browsers, and done what I can do (the website is just part of my work) to make sure that it displays correctly, that the tags are all okay, that the content matches what my tags say, and what all my links (internal, not many external yet) say.

The content is all about what we do for our customers, and seems to do okay in the serps, but if I tried to design a site as valid as you, I'd be lost!

I think you'll find someone here more than capable of the SEO your client requires - it's where I got nearly all my SEO info over the last few years.

Good luck,
Darren

[dburdon]

I suspect that the designer and SEO in the process have issues other than design or SEO.

If someone is competing in a market as geographically small as the Virgin Islands it shouldn't be that difficult to come top in either design, SEO or even Adwords.

At least providing a link to the site would allow us to make a proper judgement. But I guess there would be a political problem in revealing the website name.