Spider-friendly Tables

If your important page information is near the top of the html page, spiders get to it sooner, and so can accessibility screen readers like Jaws. But if your navigation elements are in the left cell of an html table, it not only slows down spiders. Screen reader users are forced to listen to every menu before getting to your content. So try using this spider and accessibility-friendly html table technique.

We have all seen web page examples where the site navigation elements are on the left, and page content is on the right, all contained in table cells much like these:

Standard Table

<td> navigation

<td> page content appears after navigation

The trouble is, search engine spiders must wade through everything in the left cell before getting to the important information you want the spider to see in the right cell. Switching content and navigation around so that navigation elements are on the right isn't always an option.

Solution: build spider-friendly and accessibility-friendly tables:

Improved Table

<td> leave empty	<td rowspan="2"> page content appears before navigation
<td> navigation

A table structure is very beneficial to your website's ranking as it drives the crawlers to the text rich, most important content of your pages as quickly as possible. Avoid frames and flash pages. Try to follow the spider's path trough your pages and be careful to provide the content before they are driven away by links to other pages.

In the image abowe you may see the spider's path. Thet will enter your site trough your page header, that is in your first table row. Then they go to the secon row. It's very usefull bo begin this raw with an empty table cell. The spider will go in the second column of the first row, where you place your page content. After crawling your content, the spider will follow through your last page element, where you have your footer, a place where you should put valuable text links with targeted keywords in their anchor text linked to the most important sections of your website. You may link your site-map trough your footer. For the header and footer use server site includes, so you can make easy site-wide updates without having to edit all your pages.

An even effective way to give your content to the crawlers is to avoid tables. Use css stylesheets and put your navigation bar to the right. This way the spiders first reads your content and then follows to the next page.