Is CSS Better For SEO Than Tables?
Many CSS designers will tell you that designing your website in CSS rather than tables is better for SEO. Frankly, I haven’t seen that this is true. But it isn’t any worse either.
Whether you design your website with CSS or tables is largely dependent on preference and personal style. I think it may also depend on the website. Both tables and CSS have advantages and disadvantages, but I’ve seen top rankings with both.
CSS allows you to define page elements across multiple pages, which is very helpful and can save a webmaster a lot of time. By defining background color, font colors and sizes, sidebar widths, and navigation menu properties in your stylesheet (CSS file) you can make changes to those elements on every page of your site by updating just one file. That’s a huge time saver. But there aren’t any real search engine optimization benefits by doing it that way versus defining those elements for each individual page on your site. The best practices for on site optimization are still the same.
Tables are good to use if you have a page element that will exist on just one page, or perhaps a few pages, of your website. For example, you have a list of automobile models that you sell on your car lot; you can just wrap them up in a table to set them apart from the rest of your content. Again, there is no particular SEO benefit to doing this. It is simply a design technique.
In terms of SEO, there’s no real benefit to designing a website in CSS or tables. Tables are more tedious, but CSS has its own problems. Write too many stylesheets for any one web page to access and you’ll have load time issues. Since every CSS file is an external file that must be accessed by a web browser to show a page on your site to your visitors, each stylesheet slows the load time of your web pages just a tad while the browser looks for the information. For that reason, I’d recommend no more than two stylesheets per web page.
So which is better for SEO – tables or CSS? Neither. They are both good for SEO, but they each also provide their own advantages. Modern web designers make good use of both tools.
13 Responses to “Is CSS Better For SEO Than Tables?”
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One thing you forget to mention is CSS allows you to order elements within your HTML easier than you can with Tables. Tables force designers to order their HTML in a top -> down & left -> right order. CSS allows you to get around this and go in whatever order you want.
Because of this, you can place your content higher up in the HTML tree and get your copy & keywords higher up on the page.
Hi Neal – Great point! Thanks for the additional tip for our readers!
Good advice on a unique topic. I agree with you. I think that the search engines – especially Google – are competent enough to know that websites built in CSS aren’t better than websites built in tables and vice versa. Unless you have so many tables that it really slows load time or something, but I think that would have to be a major extreme.
Hi Joel – Thanks for reading! Exactly…it would have to be an extreme issue…
Ahem. Do you mean DIVs verses tables, and not CSS verses tables? I don’t really see how CSS and tables can even be compared to each other, given that you can still style tables with any sort of CSS, whether it be inline or in an external stylesheet.
Just wanted to point that out.
I agree with Nichole … CSS can be applied to all HTML of elements.
^typo – “CSS can be applied to all HTML elements.” – sorry folks
Hi Nicole – Good point, thanks for reading!
Hey Nick,
Great article once again. Tables are great, as is CSS when they’re used in they’re correct places. Tables should only be used where tabular data is being presented, thats what they were designed for. CSS allows designers to manipulate the layout of their site’s globally, so that multiple changes don’t have to be made page after page, important on very large sites.
Or maybe its a good idea to build entire websites in Javascript, that might be most effective in terms of SEO (LOL JK)
Hi Doug – Thanks for the kind words…great reminder for everyone as to why CSS should be used, saving time is always important!
Hi Joel – LOL!
totally unimportant to Google, and all other se too. table or CSS matters not a whit just like validation doesn’t matter…
Jim
Thanks Jim for the comment