Website Is In Tables

[DerekM88]

Our website www.accupos.com is mainly created with TABLES, which I've heard is a practice from Neanderthal times.

Nevertheless, it is my job as the new Dir. of Marketing to SEO the hell out of it. Would you recommend converting the ENTIRE website into Divs or changing the current Tables situation? Or is this not a big deal for SEO?

The site APPEARS fine, but I want to get our keywords ranked as well as possible, putting my time in the most efficient places (like link building!). How much of a high priority might this Tables fix be?

We are also running an AdWords campaign spending LOTS every month.

Please Moz me!

Derek

[DerekM88]

Yes, I've been blessed with this task. I have been able to achieve #1 rankings for many less competitive keywords and Page 2 ranks for the biggest keywords we're after.

I don't suspect the Tables in our site are holding us back from a Page 1 ranking, since the competition gets so much more severe in those spots, but MAYBE!?

We do have a Wordpress blog on our subdomain, blog.accupos.com and there is already the stock CMS system there, I don't think we really need to move the rest of the site into a CMS, but just wanted to see if switching to a CSS site would make the difference we need to boost in the ranks.

The content is well optimized, the design is good, site is 9 yrs old, there's about 150 pages. Not too bad..and we do have an on-site programmer, who's never built a site in Divs before (don't ask me how). So I guess my 2nd question would be; Do I outsource this job? or trust that our in house guy can figure it out with no errs?! I didn't even think about this before. He's a bright guy but hey, your first time is your first time. I'm sure there are tricks to writing perfectly clean code for Divs and CSS, any suggestions??

DM

[ufmedia]

So you inherited a dinosaur of a website and are expected to get organic traffic.  Oh, the humanity...

First off: yes, tableless CSS sites are definitely considered best practice.  They tend to be lighter overall (i.e. pages generally contain less code), meaning they load faster and Google can crawl them faster, both of which are search signals.  BITD Amazon's pages were crammed with nested tables.  Today, not so much - it's taken them some time and effort to get there, but a lot of their content is now table-free.

However, please understand that when you say "converting the ENTIRE website into Divs," you are ultimately talking redesign, with the potential hassle and expense that entails.  Is it worth it?  At the risk of sounding really indecisive: maybe, maybe not.  It depends on a range of quantifiable and subjective factors: how much content really needs to be rewritten, how long would it take, how competitive is the site at present, how old is the current design of the site, etc.

The wider issue here is on-site vs. off-site SEO.  On-site is still very important.  On-site by itself is not enough, which you seem to understand (hence, your question on link building).  However: without a good foundation through a properly optimized web presence, link building won't be as effective.

Here's what I'd recommend.  I did a static build of a site for a client - quick job, small site (i.e. less than 10 pages).  Around 6-12 months later, we moved the site into WordPress.  It was quick, painless, quite affordable to the client, and the client now has a blog and can update/add pages with no involvement from a web designer, which suits me just fine.  However, I had already optimized the site quite effectively beforehand, so it wasn't a big deal, and as I say, it was a small site.

In your case, if:

• the site is already well optimized (good title tags/meta descriptions, well written content)
• it has a good, attractive design
• it's a mature site (URLs have been indexed for a while)
• it isn't a crapload of pages that you would have to migrate

...then it might be worth the time and expense to move the site into a content management system.  I'm a huge fan of WordPress, but there are other open source systems out there that are perfectly acceptable.

Bottom line: for any major SEO campaign, I strongly believe you need the right foundation in place first in the form of a strong website.  Depending on your situation, it may or may not make sense to move it into a CMS.

Hope that helps.  

[AdoptionHelp]

Yes absolutely change it over from tables. A lot of the work the search engines are doing lately is to understand and interpret semantic markup. A table based layout is pretty much the antithesis of semantic markup.

It doesn't seem like a presentation issue like tables could effect your SEO, but you're missing out on all the goodness of rich, semantic html.

Here's a good intro: http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/html-css/semantic-html/