When considering how your site should look, regarding the layout, graphically and textually, we must consider both our human audience and our audience of spiders.

Spiders see your site totally different than users see it. Most importantly the spiders which crawl your site do not have eyes, or ears. Therefore, all of those pretty pictures and groovy sounds you have added do nothing for the spider.

Spiders have only one thing on their mind when they come to your site: index the information. Much like a user, if a spider has to dig deep, past all the intros, images, complex navigation, etc. It will most likely leave before it gets a chance to index what is truly important. For this reason it is always a good idea to place the most important information towards the top of your document.

Regarding the actual code layout, lets consider the layout from both the code and visual layout. Most pages today are built using tables. Poor table layout can in fact push your most important content way down on the page. Lets take a look at what a spider sees versus what a user sees:

Table - as a user will see it:

Table - as a spider will see it:

While this is a simple example, we can see that the first thing a spider would encounter when crawling this table is an image, and, with the layout the way it is, the spider would not see the actual content until it reached the last part of this table.

Again, this being a simple table, it may be hard to fully illustrate the idea that the content is so far down from the top of the document that the spider would need to crawl deep, past all other code to get to the meat of the page.

So how am I supposed to correct this when the layout of my site depends on tables?

There is no easy answer for this as there are so many options available in designing web pages. Some designers are beginning to use the <Layer> tag to layout and build the pages.

Lets continue and take a look at using layers and their impact on search engine optimization as well as some more important considerations for site design. Next Section >