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The table trick for search engines
I've seen many Web pages that use tables to lay out a page
with a sidebar for navigation. These sidebars make a Web page
easy to navigate. Unfortunately, they are not so good for
search engines.
Here's an example:
Product
Order
Contact |
body text with keywords |
The corresponding HTML code is (simplified):
<table>
<tr>
<td>Product<br>Order<br>Contact</td>
<td>body text with keywords</td>
</tr>
</table>
Many search engines emphasize keywords in the first part
of the text in your HTML source. Unfortunately, with the example
above, the search engine finds "Product, Order, Contact"
instead of your body text with keywords.
On a real Web page, the navigation sidebar is much more complicated
than in the example above so that the body text with the keywords
is located in the lower part of the HTML code.
Fortunately, there's a simple trick that lets the body text
come first. The trick is so easy that you wonder why so many
Web pages do it wrong.
You just have to insert an empty cell. It looks like this:
|
body text with keywords |
Product
Order
Contact |
The corresponding HTML code is (simplified):
<table>
<tr height="0">
<td height="0"></td>
<td rowspan="2">body text with keywords</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Product<br>Order<br>Contact</td>
</tr>
</table>
Now the body text with the keywords comes first. This means
that the search engines are now able to find your keywords
quickly and easily.
Note: If you use the "height=0" command in the
HTML code, you won't see the empty cell. We didn't add the
"height=0" in this example so that you can see what
we mean.
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