Take Care,
Nick

1. According to Matt Cutts, using tables instead of CSS has no impact on how your site is crawled and indexed (at least by Google). So while tables are considered old-school, they aren’t penalized and are still very useful in certain instances. But I agree that all design elements should be used sparingly (less is more).

2. According to Matt Cutts, Google can now crawl and interpret Javascript links and a lot of Javascript code itself. In fact, they are getting quite sophisticated at doing so. (See Matt Cutts’ videos on YouTube for an example…it’s pretty amazing!) However, I agree with you to not risk putting important content in Javascript in the event Google (and other search engines) have trouble crawling it since they currently can’t interpret all Javascript code. I guess a good rule would be to make things as easy for the search engines as possible, despite how sophisticated the engines are becoming. Therefore, include your content on your pages as text in HTML tags.

3. Google always says, “if you design your website with your users in mind, then that will take care of most SEO issues.” I have to disagree with Google on this point because they contradict themselves when they say they can’t crawl Flash websites, images, videos, etc. These multimedia elements make websites much more interesting and engaging for users, but they are a black hole to search engines. I can understand why Google can’t crawl these elements, but then they shouldn’t be giving people the direction they do. I guess the take-away is to write the content of the website with users in mind, but design the structure and elements of your website with the search engines in mind.

4. According to Matt Cutts, code bloat is no longer an issue for Google. They used to only crawl the first 100k of a page, but with their upgraded systems they will crawl your entire page (within reason). So even if you have relevant content at the bottom of your page preceded by tons of extraneous code, Google will still crawl and index that content. But I agree with you that making life easier for search engines is better, and eliminating any unnecessary code is a good idea.

5. Your points about internal links and hard-coded links is valid. Matt Cutts made a point to webmasters to ensure their internal linking structure is robust. Along those lines, Matt also said that links in the content of your page are given more weight by Google than navigational links in menus and footers that appear on every page and aren’t surrounded by relevant content. So if you have a page you definitely want Google to index, be sure to link to it in your content and don’t just rely on your navigational link structure.

I hope this helps…keep up the good work Nick.

Hi Terry,
Excellent points and I do like the “creative site design” term as well! Thanks for the comment!

1) “Easy Navigation” with proper hierarchy, meaning more important content needs to be closer to the root, homepage. It’s better for a site not to be deeper than 4 layers. Also, the main menu of the site should be easily visible providing the main sections of the site accessible from anywhere at the site.

2) “Enhanced Linking Structure” enriched with the top keywords of the site directing to the top landing pages. Such links are to be made using a technology understandable by search engines not Java Script, flash, etc.

Altogether, with the above two points the presence of keywords are more felt by both site visitors and search engines.

I also think one point that is skipped over is the lack of use of images and optimising those – adding good alt tags, strong visual affordance, well named… these are all things that get missed on a regular basis – sadly!