In doing some work for Kendall Riggins & Associates Northwest Arkansas Real Estate recently, I was disappointed to find that the site was built using tables. For me, the biggest issue was the fact that it is just a jumbled mess to look at. I decided that it would not be a major effort to keep the same design using divs and css, and it would certainly make things easier on me. The benefits of doing this were many including validation, ease of editing and last but not least file size. File size is always in the back of my mind when building or editing any web page but I never really considered why it is important for SEO.



Take for example the index page, with the table method of layout the file size was 24,576 bytes. After ripping out all the tables and inline styles the file size came down to 16,384 bytes. Even taking the new css file (4,488 bytes uncompressed) into consideration that a total of 20872 bytes. Looking at it another way thats 3704 bytes (almost 4k) worth of tr and td tags. Now to the person viewing a webpage that is not going to make a very noticeable difference as far as page load time goes, at least on a cable connection or better. I can however assure you googlebot will notice.



If you were not aware of it you can go to tools---> "set crawl rate" in webmaster tools to see the charts for your site. As you will note from the circled red area above, the time that google spends downloading a page is in a direct correlation with how often and how much it crawls. Google is busy keeping up with the billions upon billions of webpages out there so to the milliseconds count. Use your divs, avoid the tables if at all possible and keep up with how well your host is serving up your pages.

tags: divs, vs., tables,, filesize,, googlebot