By Lee Sykes
January & February 2006
The feature of a search engine optimized skin is to easily guide the search engine spiders through your page to the main content that you wish to be indexed as quickly as possible.
Many web designers do not understand the importance of a search engine optimized skin. You can give your website the extra edge over your competition by ensuring your skin design is fully search engine optimized.
How do you create a search engine optimized skin?
The priority in a SEO skin is to place within the source code of a page, the main body of content that you wish to be indexed above the less important content such as the menu.
For instance in a traditional page layout:
If you view the source code, the order of the code is the Header, Menu, Main Content.
This means that the search engine spiders have to work their way through the source code for the Header and Menu before reaching the Main Content. The idea behind a SEO skin is to place the Main Content as high as possible in the source code so that the search engine spiders can quickly find the main content, but, at the same time, the layout of the page to the users of your website still appears as though it is using the traditional layout.
In the video tutorial we explain how to use table tricks to create search engine optimized layouts, while also demonstrating the pros and cons of these table tricks.
We have included the code for the tables with the video downloads.
Video Contents:
- Viewing a traditional table structure and the problems for search engines
- Table trick v1: Demonstration and explanation of how it works
- Problems with table trick v1 in the firefox browser and the solution
- Problems with table trick v1 in the Internet Explorer browser
- Table trick v2: Demonstration and explanation of how it works
- Problems with table trick v2 and the solution
Time Length: 12min 12secs