In today’s complicated online world, there are many things you need to worry about. You have hundreds, if not thousands, of other websites just like yours, to compete with. You also have to compete against people who are paying for their rankings in the search engines. If you are hoping to be ranked high without paying for it, or just don’t have the big budget that other companies do, you have to know all the tricks of what will work to get you to the top of the search engines, and what will hurt your chances.

One thing that can really hurt your chances of being ranked high is the excessive use of HTML tables on your pages. These tables were originally designed as a way to arrange content on a site, especially into columns. By using tables, you are able to create more than just one long column of text.

Much of what HTML tables was used for, has now been replaced by either Flash or simple CSS coding, but there are many websites that use tables as a means to place text. There are two main problems with this – the search engines can’t read them and neither can readers for the visually impaired.

When a search engine crawls your site, it goes through the code, looking for information on what your site is about, where the content is, what the audience and keywords are, and where it should be placed in their listings. If you confuse it with a lot of table cells, it will bypass your content altogether.

In the case of electronic readers for the visually impaired, they are unable to follow the flow from left to right, through the cells. HTML tables confuse these readers and make your website inaccessible to the visually impaired as well.

So….bottom line? You guessed it, get rid of your HTML tables.