Division with DIVs

It still amazes me how many people are told by scrupulous Marketing and Web companies that if their site is not "W3C compliant" or that their site is not built using DIVs (divisions) that the site would not be indexed correctly by Google or optimised for the search engines.

So, with the help of Google themselves and some of the top SEO companies in the world, I would like to put this to bed once and for all.

DIVs vs Table
There has been a clear divide (sorry) within the web world over which is the best to use. The short answer is both are fine. Tables have always been used since the start of the World Wide Wed, with DIV coding coming later. Some sites work better in DIVs others in table and both are spiderable by the search engines.

A recent article by an SEO expert which went through the "8 Myths of SEO" had this to say about tables and divisions:

"This one makes me want to scream. HTML tables have been easily spiderable by search engines since the search engines were newly hatched. As far as I know, table code has never been anything that choked the search engines. I think this myth was propagated by website developers who advocate tableless designs to make you think you’ll somehow get better rankings out of their designs. You won’t."



Interesting that this made number 3 in the top 8! The main key for any website is to ensure that it is using clean semantic coding so that it can easily be spidered.

I have seen many sites that use either tables OR divisions that are not clean code and have issues with being indexed. 
 
W3C Compliant
Firstly what is it - well the official definition is "W3C was created to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for inconsistency between web pages. The consortium was created to get all those vendors to agree on a set of core principles and components which would be supported by everyone."
 
Great, but will a site that is W3C compliant be ranked better than a site that is not? Answer is no - and that answer comes from Google themselves!
 
For more reading on this I would suggest looking at this interesting article on W3C http://yoast.com/w3c-validation-seo/
 
At the end of the article is a video by Matt Cutts who is a Software engineer for Google who not only says there's no bonus for validating, but why.

I said at the start of this blog about scrupulous Marketing and Web companies talking about DIVs and W3C. These companies will band about phrases and techinical jargon to make it look like they know what they are doing in order to get your business........so becareful please.

Give anyone time, its easy to pick holes in a website and Im sure if I had a spare 5mins I can totally trash the BBCs website design and coding; But I wont and the real question you should be asking yourself is "Does my website do what I want it too?
 
So Finally - want 3 top tips to help get your site ranked?
 
1 - Content - make changes to your site with new and relevant content on a regular baisis
2 - Linking - get links with relevant companies and organisations. This will not only help your SEO but will also drive traffice to your site
3 - Social media - checkout and use these free services such as blogs, twitter, linkedin and even facebook to drive traffic to your site.
 
And if you really need help - then please call us and we can recommend and good honest SEO company that will give you impartial advise. They have done work for us and our clients, with their results being outstanding.