Wedsite launched: feedback welcome

[Globulator]

Perhaps you can point me towards a Google article that states that tables are not good for SEO?
Given 99% of the web uses tables I'd be surprised.
I just can't see a spider being phased by a table - what am I missing?

I've looked up doing tables in CSS a few times now, after a certain amount of experimentation I end up back at tables, as the pragmatic way that works in all cases.
This includes articles that proclaim that the table is dead and CSS can do it.
Can you give me an example of a CSS table that actually works in Safari, firefox, IE and Opera?

[miniman]

We're talking at cross purposes here. There's nothing wrong with using tables for tabular data. What is bad is using them to set up the layout of non-tabular data. e.g. you want 2 images, one next to the other, so you put them into a table. That's poor practice. Mostly for accessibility reasons, but as the article I linked to says, good semantic code is good for search engines as well as people with accessibility needs.

Not going to get into a big debate about it - just ask any decent web developer; anyone worth their salt will tell you exactly the same.

[Globulator]

miniman said:

We're talking at cross purposes here. There's nothing wrong with using tables for tabular data. What is bad is using them to set up the layout of non-tabular data. e.g. you want 2 images, one next to the other, so you put them into a table. That's poor practice.

I think we are talking about tha same thing, but with me not understanding how you create the layout effects of a table by using CSS. My knowledge of CSS is not all encompassing, I can get it to flow blocks nicely etc. but never to replicate table rules under all conditions.

Back to your example - the two pictures - how would you do that with CSS in such a way that no browser ever wrapped it?
I.e regardless of page size and browser, you wanted the images side by side..

[bingbong]

Assuming i've understood the brief
linky

Tested in Firefox 3, ie 7, Safari 3.1 and Opera 9

[Globulator]

Wrapping things up in a DIV will prevent wrapping the actual div, but I have had divs being squashed (by IE I think) so it then decided to wrap the contents instead, keeping the DIV complete.

So it followed the rules but broke the spirit (and the look). I think I left that as a div though as I could not be bothered to use a table and it worked OK most of the time.

Tables are good at lining things up and DIVs, SPANs etc have their place, but personally using HTML/CSS as an end publishing tool I've always found limiting, and ended up writing a higher level language web language that gets interpreted by PHP into a mix of HTML and CSS as appropriate.

In that way I can keep content even further away from presentation, and if I fancy doing columns etc that would be fairly basic too. It also means that when I want to put in a gallery or something I just whack a bunch of photos into a directory and point to them. I guess I'm saying I prefer Wiki functionality to bare HTML/CSS, but if I have to use HTML/CSS I'll use a table when I want the layout properties of tables, and DIVs etc when I want flowing blocks - something simply not possible with HTML.

[bingbong]

Globulator said:

Wrapping things up in a DIV will prevent wrapping the actual div, but I have had divs being squashed (by IE I think) so it then decided to wrap the contents instead, keeping the DIV complete.

So it followed the rules but broke the spirit (and the look). I think I left that as a div though as I could not be bothered to use a table and it worked OK most of the time.

Tables are good at lining things up and DIVs, SPANs etc have their place, but personally using HTML/CSS as an end publishing tool I've always found limiting, and ended up writing a higher level language web language that gets interpreted by PHP into a mix of HTML and CSS as appropriate.

In that way I can keep content even further away from presentation, and if I fancy doing columns etc that would be fairly basic too. It also means that when I want to put in a gallery or something I just whack a bunch of photos into a directory and point to them. I guess I'm saying I prefer Wiki functionality to bare HTML/CSS, but if I have to use HTML/CSS I'll use a table when I want the layout properties of tables, and DIVs etc when I want flowing blocks - something simply not possible with HTML.

That looks interesting, not sure i'd use it, but could work well as part of a content management system. Using [] to close tags is a great idea, it means you would never get mismatched tags.
Anyway I think we've probably gone way too far off topic now, and will probably just have to agree to disagree about the relative merits of css and tables for layout.

[Globulator]

Thanks - I've never understood why people have to type [/tag] into a giant computer running at many gigahertz
In practice it makes typing stuff incredibly fast!

[edmason]

WOW. My mail server has been down for 48 hours, and I come back to this. The thread seems to have taken on a life of its own, but I'm still not sure what, if anything, I can do myself to make my site more effective and search engine friendly?

Non technical advice would be welcome.

Thanks

Ed

[miniman]

First things first: you need to sort out the keyword tags. Take a look in the source code (View... Source in IE / View... Page Source in Firefox) and at the top of the file you will see:

[meta name="KEYWORDS" content="" /]

(except it will be < > brackets not [ ])

Where it says content="" you need to fill in some keywords for each page, with a comma between each one. For example, on your homepage, you could start with

content="classic, car, MG, Triumph, Stag, MGB" and so forth.

Don't put in too many, or Google will start penalising you. Also, make sure that the words you choose actually appear in the page. This means different keywords per page. If you use keywords that are not on the page, Google will penalise you.

Also worth filling in the meta description tag:

[meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="" /]

Whatever you enter in the content="" area here is what users who search for you will see in the Google search results. e.g. search Google for "bbc" and you will see "bbc.co.uk offers a range of sites including news, sport, community, education, children's, and lifestyle sites, TV programme support, radio on demand".

Next, start linking to other sites from yours, and try to get other people to link to you. A good starting point would be to put a link to your site in your PH profile (surprising how much traffic this can generate!) and also add yourself to the PH Oilypages directory (www.oilypages.com). It matters not a jot how good your keywords are, or many many times you submit your site to Google, if you don't have inbound and outbound links you won't get anywhere.

Feel free to mail me if you want any help with doing any of this!

Oh and by the way, why no Dolly Sprints on your site!?

Edited by miniman on Wednesday 21st May 21:09

[bulldog_1]

excellent work, well done

[edmason]

miniman said:

First things first: you need to sort out the keyword tags. Take a look in the source code (View... Source in IE / View... Page Source in Firefox) and at the top of the file you will see:

[meta name="KEYWORDS" content="" /]

(except it will be < > brackets not [ ])

Where it says content="" you need to fill in some keywords for each page, with a comma between each one. For example, on your homepage, you could start with

content="classic, car, MG, Triumph, Stag, MGB" and so forth.

Don't put in too many, or Google will start penalising you. Also, make sure that the words you choose actually appear in the page. This means different keywords per page. If you use keywords that are not on the page, Google will penalise you.

Also worth filling in the meta description tag:

[meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="" /]

Whatever you enter in the content="" area here is what users who search for you will see in the Google search results. e.g. search Google for "bbc" and you will see "bbc.co.uk offers a range of sites including news, sport, community, education, children's, and lifestyle sites, TV programme support, radio on demand".

Next, start linking to other sites from yours, and try to get other people to link to you. A good starting point would be to put a link to your site in your PH profile (surprising how much traffic this can generate!) and also add yourself to the PH Oilypages directory (www.oilypages.com). It matters not a jot how good your keywords are, or many many times you submit your site to Google, if you don't have inbound and outbound links you won't get anywhere.

Feel free to mail me if you want any help with doing any of this!

Oh and by the way, why no Dolly Sprints on your site!?

Edited by miniman on Wednesday 21st May 21:09

That's really helpful, and clear. Thanks.