Which layout elements are best for SEOing?

Afternoon!

I'm in the planning stages of my consulting business site and I'm looking for some personal opinions on the matter of layout elements.

I've been using divs for the last couple of years building websites for clients and friends, but now that I'm starting to investigate SEO more and more, I'm finding that tables seem to provide better structure and flow of information for the web spider to find your information. What I want to know is, with divs starting to make headway in design, do spiders now treat pure div sites the same as those layed out with tables? I've seen sites that use tables for the container and main section areas, including div tags within the tables themselves, but I've always been weary of such practices, should I be?

Thanks for taking the time to read this and thinking this over.

I have over the last 2 years used div, frames and now mostly tables and my Google PR has stayed the same throughout. Seems to me the coding choice doesn't seem to matter much. Make your site look good with solid content and I think the BOTs will eat it up dispite the validated code you use.

There is no definitive proof one way or the other however, CSS designs externally referenced [tableless] IMHO is a better fit for SEO.

Rational - for proper positioning using tables you tend to have a table inside a table cell, inside a table cell etc. all of this "code" is irrelevant for relevancy & weight which is the primary importance of SEO.

That said: two identical cars with one loaded down with 8 people, and a trunk full of heavy items will get far less mileage on a tank of gas than the other 'empty' car.

Thus is short 'code blot' likely has some influence [but not enough to be conclusive in real world testing].

When I switch from table to CSS I tried the "car test" - the problem though "fresh" creates a certain amount of bias so even though the results could conclude CSS is better - SEs are just way too dynamic to commit to one or the other.

I prefer CSS - that's it.

PageRank is irrelevant to the question asked. Neither 'table' nor 'CSS' are a hyperlink thus cannot pass PageRank.

Yes, I agree, notice what stands out is Validated code, and I would not use frames myself. But you're right, it doesn't appear to matter much except maybe validated code.

The thread is not talking about 'validating code', i think, and the q is regarding which Layout Style is good.

In that, i agree with Fathom, I would go with CSS only, than going behind looped tables....
Reasons:
1. I can align my content on top of the page and my menus at the bottom in the code flow, while keeping the graphical visibility to my visitors.

2. The loading speed.

3. better usage og Headings, Bold etc. to make sure better performance in the SERPs...

are some...

Whatever you use, just make sure that the ratio of information to noise is good. In other words, don't fill your HTML with too many unnecessary tags of any kind ... keep it as clean and simple as possible.

yes and don't use frames

i use tables

http://www.spidersweb.co.nr/