How would you go about optimizing a website that was made from a template?

Question

Here's the deal. I have a potential customer who purchased a website from a company in India. This website is based on a template they use. My potential client is telling me that the site is not listed at all; not coming up in search results for any keywords.

I looked at the site and it's all tables. No wonder the guy isn't getting any traffic. Looking at the site, do you think this is a lost cause? Would he have to restructure the entire site to optimize it--or can I work with what I have here? I know there are tricks to making sites more searchable with tables, but this code looks pretty hairy.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

What on earth to tables have to do with search engines results? Your question doesn't even make any sense.



Is there any searchable content on the site i.e., text? Are there any links to the site from relevant web sites? What is the link text? Has the site been crawled by the search engines? (Is there a robots.txt excluding their spiders from crawling it?)



The issues for search results are exactly the same whether the site is written in tables, HTML 2.0, divs and css, Web 2.0, XHTML, SVG and canvas, Holographic-HTML-7.0, etc., etc. Tables have absolutely nothing to do with it. Do you think googlebot has forgotten how to crawl the kinds of pages that made up most of the web at the time it was originally written?

Answer 2

The information is not clear... tables are not so bad for SEO, you can use table and still be found, many websites still using tables. Of course if you can use CSS + XHTML is better, but not required.



If it is not listed maybe is because the content is not interesting. If you have a blog, forum or other "rich" content you will have better chance.



Look like you need more a SEO company than redesign the website.



However if you really think the website is very bad coded, you can contact us for consultant: http://www.cloud1design.com

Answer 3

For SEO, utilize HTML meta tags, first.

Make sure to use

,

... tags for titles and subtitles.

And submit to google. http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html



And for cleaning up, it's all about divide and conquer.

Figure out which tables are hold header, left column, menu, main content area, footer, etc. Replace each of them one by one with

tag and CSS.