SEO was: Re: [thelist] PHP and Search Engine Bots.

Simon Willison cs1spw at bath.ac.uk
Sat Oct 4 04:46:47 CDT 2003


David Mitchell wrote:

> I second Raditha's opinion regarding tables. I've managed to climb very
> high in Google rankings while relying on tables for layout. I think one
> of the most important things to concentrate on instead in proper
> keywords in your page titles, using h1, h2, etc tags, and reciprocal
> linking.

I've always wondered just how valuable a table free layout is with 
regards to Google search ranking. There's no question that intelligent 
use of <h1>, <h2> and the /essential/ <title> tag (having a good title 
for your page can rocket you up the rankings) have a big affect on your 
search engine placement, but do Google really favour table free layouts? 
It wouldn't make much commercial sense for them to do so since most of 
the web is still coded like it was 1997 and the standard of the HTML on 
a page has no baring at all on the standard of the content, which is 
what Google and its users are interested in.

I use CSS for layout, keep all my content near the top of the source 
code and try to keep the ratio of HTML to real text as low as possible 
(see http://www.holovaty.com/tools/getcontentsize/ ) and my blog comes 
at the top of a lot of different searches (some more relevant than 
others), but I'm pretty sure most of that is down to the number of 
incoming links rather than the quality of the markup.

As always, SEO is something of a dark art.

Cheers,

Simon Willison
http://simon.incutio.com/



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