BlueSkyVista: All You Need To Know About SEO

When you construct a website’s layout with tables, it’s difficult to let search engines know which content is important and should be read first. It also pushes important content further down the page while littering your code with unnecessary markup (altering your page’s code-to-content ratio in the process…but that’s another post.)

For example, most designers will create a table with a header cell, then 2 column cells below it for the navigation (left) and content (right) plus a final footer cell for the copyright information (not to mention a dozen empty cells that function as gutters and placeholders). Once they’ve constructed this already un-optimized structure, they proceed to add even more nested tables, making it even more difficult for search engines to determine what is important.

With this layout, the search engines first reads your header (which is probably just a graphic), then your navigation (which probably has deficient keywords like, “About Us, Products, and Contact Us, etc.), and then finally finds your keyword-rich content. The search engine is forced to wade through all of the unimportant bits before it actually finds something valuable to index.

You are better off constructing the main architecture of the site with positionable DIVs. With CSS and DIV’s, you can construct your page so that all of the important content gets read first in your source code, but is still presented on-screen in whatever manner you wish the human viewer to see it.

Strange title for a blog post about search engine optimization, I know…but it’s true!

In my experience, when small business owners first discover that they can obtain higher rankings in the free, organic search listings by “optimizing” their sites, they tend to go crazy and implement every tactic they read about from every forum and blog they read.

Not a good idea.

Start small, grasshopper…and don’t try tactics that you are unsure of (or are unproven) with your bread-and-butter business site. One wrong move and you can get banned from the SERPS (search engine results pages) altogether! Then what?

Instead, buy a domain (or ten) to experiment with. I myself have a dozen non-business-related websites that I experiment with to discover what works and what doesn’t. When I find methods that work and are proven (long-term, of course), I’ll use the same approach on my client sites (and my own!)…but not until then.

Never forget that many of your visitors are doing their due-diligence/research online so that they can ultimately make the decision to make the purchase at your brick-and-mortar store.