CSS versus HTML tables for page layouts

I once got caught in the hype that having your entire website being without tables and all css styling instructions being in a separate file would help the search engines crawl my site better. While having all your styling information in a separate style.css file does help your website’s overall code cleanliness and makes it easier to update your website’s look in the future, it doesn’t do too much in terms of a search engine bot being able to get all the content on your website.

You see, search engines don’t care how your website looks, search engines only care about the valuable content and links that are on your website. All the HTML code that is in between:

<table></table> or <style></style>

is completely ignored by the search engine bots.

Now, I am a firm believer in keeping your code clean which is why I will always put my styling information in my style.css file as much as possible. Do I use tables for some of my layouts? Yes, I admit 100% that I use tables to do some of the layouts that css alone would make it difficult to accomplish. Whenever I do use tables, I always assign a css class to the table data to style the table cell correctly. An example of this would be the following:

Style sheet:

.left_advertising {
line-height: 100%;
font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-size: 12px;
font-weight: normal;
text-align:left;
}
HTML page:

<td class="left_advertising" valign="top" width="30%">

So whether you use tables or not really doesn’t matter. I mainly use tables when I know that css is going to be difficult to work with like in a 3 column situation. The 3 column css structure might work in new browsers, but go to Internet Explorer 6 and it turns into a big mess. With tables you don’t have to worry about these problems. Another example would be a css navigation menu. Let’s say you want to center the menu, using a simple table can center the navigation bar quite easily.

Definitely use css as much as you possibly can to layout your site, but when it comes to situations where cascading style sheets aren’t going to do the trick for you, don’t be afraid to use a simple HTML table, it won’t hurt your search engine rankings.

Tags: 3 Column, Cascading Style Sheets, Code, Content, Crawl, CSS, CSS Class, HTML Code, HTML Tables, Navigation Menu, Page Layouts, Search Engine Bots, Search Engine Rankings, Search Engines, Style.css, Table Cell, Website