Website Is In Tables
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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/
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
How do I redirect my old PHP website to my new Java website?
Please could you help? My old website is written in php. I've created a new design of the website in Java. I'll be using the same domain name though. example.com and I'd like to pass my link juice to my new redesigned website. When I turn the domain name to point to my new website how do I make sure pages that are ranked in google that don't exist on my new website transfer 301 from my old website to a similar page on my new website. Old Website Example example.com/bootcampuk.php New Website Example example.com/bootcamps.jsp Many Thanks, Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | puamethod0 -
Client rebranded with a new website but can't migrate now defunct franchise website to new website.
Hi everyone, My client is a chain of franchised restaurants with a local domain website named after the franchise. The franchise exited the market while the client stayed and built its own brand with a separate website. The franchise website (which is extremely popular) will be shut down soon but the client will not be able to redirect the franchise website to the new website for legal reasons. What can I do to ensure that we start ranking immediately for the franchise keyphrase as soon as the franchise website is shutdown. We currently have the new website and access to the old website (which we can't redirect) Thanks, T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tarek_Lel0 -
Guidelines for a second website business domain
Hi There, A client is setting up a second website selling the same products from a separate domain with the same descriptions etc. The site will have a separate URL, but will administered from the same CMS. The only difference is the new site has only one brand instead of several on the main site. E.G The main site sells all plumbing brands, the second site just one brand. Your thoughts and advice for best practise would be much appreciated. Andy (Marz Ventures)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
Problems with a website-help
Soooooo, I did a crawl report on this site : www.greatwesternflooring.com and this was what was on the report. This is a dnn site. I'm guessing the site has a redirect loop given the http status code. Can anyone help me with a fix. (the developers have said there is no redirect on the site......clearly there is....) | http://www.greatwesternflooring.com/ | 2015-01-07T21:32:25Z | 609 : Redirect to already-visited URL received for page request. | Error attempting to request page; see title for details. | 302 | http://www.greatwesternflooring.com | <colgroup><col width="319"> <col width="144"> <col width="378"> <col span="39" width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Britewave
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |0 -
My websites Keyword Ranking are going down dont know why ....
Hi my website's Keywords Ranking are going down, i am very new to SEO, i dont know whats a reason please help me out....my website is www.livetecs.com. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz0 -
Rel=canonical an iframed version of the same website?
My issue is that we have two websites with the same content. For the sake of an example lets say they are: jackson.com jacksonboats.com When you go to jacksonboats.com, the website is an iframed version of jackson.com. However all of the companies email addresses are example@jacksonboats.com so a 301 is not possible. What would be the best way to forward over the link juice from jacksonboats.com to jackson.com? I'm thinking a rel=canonical tag, but I wanted to ask first. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenGMKT0 -
Should we Use rel=canonical in ccTLDs websites
We have multilingual eCommerce websites with some content variations but majority of the content remains the same We have used rel=alternate hreflang on corresponding ccTLDs respective countries. for example on example.com -which is the oldest of these sites- we have used Now should we also use link rel="canonical" href="example.com" on all ccTLDs? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CyrilWilson0