SEO and Good Design - Riding Off Into the Sunset

Part 2

SEO and Good Design - Riding Off Into the Sunset

James Kendall writes in an article for webdesign.org "One of the more recent developments in web design is the use of CSS and Semantic markup. CSS and semantic web design has several benefits: clarity in code, browser and other web-enabled devices compatibility, seperation of content and presentation, smaller burden on bandwith, and better visibility in the search engines." Read the entire article.

Pretend you're a search engine and you have 3,946 web sites to look over and record information about in less than an hour. Now I don't know how many web sites are spidered by search engines in a given hour, but I'm trying to make the point that the search engines are very busy looking at web sites and making decisions about them as they do.

So, you're a search engine. Which one of these web page portions can you find the content in most quickly?

<table width="580" border="1" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0" bgcolor="silver">
<tr>
<td align="center" valign="top"><font size="2" color="red" face="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><b>This is a brief bit of Code!</b></font></td>
<td align="right" valign="bottom"><font size="1" color="black" face="Georgia"> <i><b>Tables were never meant for layout purposes</b></i></font></td>
<td align="left"><a href="links.html" title="Links To Something Important"><img src="images/someimage.jpg" alt="Some Image"/></a></td>
</tr>
</table>

<div id="layer1"><h1 class="red">This is a brief bit of Code!</</h1>
<p class="gray">Tables were never meant for layout purposes</p>
<a href="links.html" title="Link To Something Important">Link to Something Important</a>
</div>

Amazingly enough, the second bit of code will display the very same thing as the first! See how much easier and quicker that reads? Search engines look for the textual content just like you do and they only have so much time to read through each web site. Because the search engine spiders use a top down method for retrieving information from a web page, the search engines may not end up reading all of your content. If they can't read all your content, you will not get ranked appropriately!

If you use "rollover" buttons or images as links to the other pages in your site, the search engine can't read them at all and will not follow those links to see what the rest of your site is about. If they can't gather information on those other pages in your site, they won't rank them at all.

Finally, wouldn't it be exciting if your web site could be read by people using a computer, a cell phone, a PDA or the next invention to view web sites? Becasue CSS is a standards-compliant coding language, it can! It will even work with standards-compliant devices of the future.