Search Engine Friendly Table Structure

22/09
2005

Looking at your pages code the way the search engine spiders do.

Go and find the homepage of one of your websites, one that you worked hard on and got it looking exactly how you wanted. Great work! Now use your mouse and right click and view the page source, still happy? This is the view that you’re most important visitor gets, the search engine spider.

The spider only sees the code so look carefully again and look where that carefully crafted text on the page is. I bet is somewhere down the code and more often than not its even after all the navigation links to the rest of your site.

If you were the spider what would you think of the page now? Odds are if you were that spider you would be slightly confused about what was important on the page.

Now don’t be too disheartened this common problem is very easily solved for most site owners by implementing a quick fix, one that id like to share with you now. In these days of complete acceptance of CSS we could have created the site and positioned the code layout how we wanted but for many sites the traditional table based layout will have been used.

The traditional webpage table layout looks something like this: –

Cell1 â€“ Main Graphic Banner

Cell2 â€“ Navigation links
Cell3 â€“ Main Content

The problem comes because the search engine spider reads the code from the top of the page down and the way this table is coded means that the navigation links will come higher in the code than the main content. So to fix this the simple trick I use is to add an extra table cell at the top of the navigation section and to make the cell in the main section span two rows. This makes the table layout look like this: –

Cell1 â€“ Main Graphic
Cell2 â€“ Main Content
Cell3 â€“ Navigation Links

See the way the table cells are read now?

The spider skips past our new added cell and moves straight onto the main course of our vital content before finishing off with those navigation links.

That was easy eh?

This technique can even be implemented on existing websites without causing any disruption to the look and feel. You will have to take a little care if you have a complicated layout but if you have a traditional simple table based layout then you should be able to add this technique to your page without too many headaches.

What’s that?

You just want a simple template you can use?

Heres your free template (copy and paste it)

And for those who cust want the code here it is for a simple page, copy and paste and above all get those spiders in!

<html>

<head>
<title>Keyword Phrase</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">

<tr>
<td colspan="2">Insert Main Graphic Here </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="200" height="2"></td>

<td width="580" rowspan="2" valign="top"><h1><strong>Keyword1</strong></h1>
<br>
<br>

<h2>Keyword2 in phrase</h2>
<br>
<br>
Main content goes here </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">Link 1<br>

Link 2<br>
Link 3 </td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Good Luck!

[ Original Source ]

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