Tables are considered a 'nuisance' in Web site design. There are a lot of problems associated with their layout and loading. A tableless design, therefore, is in great demand today. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the best alternative to tables in a Web site. CSS allows a tableless Web design in which page layout control is achieved without the use of HTML tables. It simply arranges the text and the other elements of the page in a cascading style.
CSS is developed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with an aim to improve Web accessibility. CSS, to an extent, addresses the concerns related to Web 2.0 sites that demand a lot of time for their uploading.
CSS and Search engine optimizationCSS has gained greater significance in search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. Tableless Web sites generate more traffic to them. All major search engines, including Google and Yahoo, are not in favor of tabled Web pages. Therefore, CSS Web sites rank higher in terms of search engine visibility as well.
A search engine ranks Web site on the basis of the contents. Often, keywords play the significant role in deciding the Web site ranking. A table in a Web site may contain a lot of primary and secondary keywords, which can actually act as leads for the search engine crawlers. However, the search engine algorithms fail to recognize the contents inside a table, meaning they would not notice the keywords contained in them. Since the Web sites with such tables usually do not have much text content in them, the chances for further 'keyword optimization' remain bleak.
By adopting a CSS design, you separate these keywords from the tabular format and display them like other text entries. CSS design allows you to organize the most important content at the top of the page without affecting the layout of the page. In a CSS style sheet, you put all the style elements in the external CSS style sheet. Thus the Web page becomes more content rich. Also, these tableless layouts are of smaller size, and so they reduce loading time considerably.
CSS tables are highly flexible too. They let you make changes to the layout without difficulty. Changes can be made to the styles as well as the graphics. In short, CSS Web sites offer multiple benefits to a Web site in terms of its usability and search engine optimization.
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