HTML Tables Vs. CSS Div Tags

Posted on December 17th, 2008 in Search Engine Optimization, Web Design | No Comments »

I was recently told about this website called Raven SEO Tools. It’s a free website where you can get your website analyzed a bunch of different ways (it cost money for more than one website). I ran a Design Analyzer on my site SwimUniversity.com and it came up with some startling results.

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I was blown away by this. I thought if anything I had the website part of it down pat. But I kept reading and this is what it said.

Obsolete & Deprecated HTML

We found 7 instances where your Web page is using obsolete or deprecated HTML. The use of these HTML elements usually makes your Web pages larger (which increases download time), and they are no longer used in modern Web design. For optimal Web design and search engine results, we recommend only using a combination of validated XHTML and CSS — where all styles have been stripped from the XHTML and placed in the CSS.

Below is a list of obsolete or deprecated HTML. If an element is listed without an attribute, the element is considered obsolete or deprecated. If an element and attribute are shown together, the attribute is considered obsolete or deprecated.

  • table align
  • table bgcolor
  • td height
  • td width
  • td bgcolor
  • a target
  • img name

Your Web design appears to use nested table elements. Nested tables are used to control the layout of a Web page, but are no longer used in modern Web design. All layouts should be controlled by CSS. Nested tables break up the semantic order of a Web page, and unnecessarily increase the page size.

I have been building webpages using HTML tables for years and now I come to find out that you should not build your website using nested tables for SEO purposes. Now I know that wordpress doesn’t use tables but I really didn’t want to learn how to re-build my entire website using CSS and DIV tags. I use CSS but for fonts not for the complete design.

I started trying to redesign my site in CSS using DIV tags and I was able to it pretty quickly. The problem came when I realized that my entire website was dynamic and I didn’t want to screw it all up. Especially because my title were dynamic too.

So I did a little research and found out that using CSS and DIV tags are the ideal for website design because you can make one change to a CSS file and it changes it across the entire website but it DOES NOT EFFECT YOUR SEO. Which to me was the most important part. So I have decided not to re-build my website in CSS right away but I am going to slowly construct a test site just so I can build my knowledge about DIV tags and CSS.

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32 Successful & Killer Website Building Tactics I Use

Posted on November 25th, 2008 in Helpful Tools & Resources, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Design, Web Promotion | 1 Comment »

I have been slowly compiling this list for 3 days. These are all tips that I used to build my websites and even this one.

1. Redirect 404 Page
2. Use Header Tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>
3. Make your links the color blue, so that visitors know that it’s a link
4. Use CSS, for site wide customization and website speed
5. Use short meta data. Every page has to have a title, about 5 Keywords and a brief description
6. Use Google Analytics to track visitors on your website. It’s free.
7. Start a blog using wordpress (it’s the most SEO-Friendly)
8. Use a robot.txt to blog google from going into useless folders on your server.
9. Create an xml sitemap and submit it to Google’s Webmaster Tools.
10. Use large text.
11. Create great content. Content is King!
12. Twitter!!!!
13. Sign up for Stumble Upon
14. Sign Up for Delcious
15. Use flash animation sparingly. Google doesn’t read flash…yet.
16.Choose an easy to spell domain name
17. Get a .com screen name. All the others in my opiniion are worthless.
18. Be consistent in your design across all your pages.
19. Use alt tags on all your images.
20. Check your spelling
21. Create an about us page
22. make sure your webpage works on every browser.
23. Do not play music on your site. If you do make sure it’s the users choice to play it
24. Stay away from intro pages.
25. Add Search function to your website
26. Animated Gifs are tacky, don’t use them
27. Intralink within your website. If there is relevant content related to a page, link it
28. Less images = Faster load times
29. make sure every page has a different page title, keywords and description to match the content
30. Have someone else proofread your work
31. Do not submit to crappy directories that mean nothing
32. Review your website every week and make changes

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