......still going..

[Booooze]

hey all,
finished my site(with everything i want so far), only one problem....search engines wont find it. i had this problem aloooong time ago, and so i kept puttin it off. i have finally come back to it and finsihed it and just have this last problem.
ive looked at wc3 validation etc. and it hasnt done anything for me, it just doesnt work. i knew there would be some problems. thing is, does a STYLE tag count as xhtml? cause i used html and a bit of style. don't freak out cause i used tabled for me layout,lol, but thats the way i started it.w/e. wat i wanna know is:
1: do you absolutely need a DOCTYPE?
2: does Style count as XHTML?
3: Is there a difference between xhtml meta tags and html metatags?
4: Will using tables for my layout be A BIG DEAL?
5: Can you help me?

I looked around at all this stuff, read about it, but cant really understand it. can any1 help me plz? i have put alot of time and effort into my site and am looking forward to seeing it in a search engine!

heres me address:

www.cptestcentral.vze.com

Thanks,

Booooze

[fredmv]

Originally posted by Booooze
do you absolutely need a DOCTYPE?Absolutely? As in, required for the page to render? No, however, the absence of a DOCTYPE will throw the browser into something called "quirks mode". This basically means that it renders the page according to what was safe back in the late 1990s — as opposed to now. By adding a DOCTYPE, what you're really doing is defining explicit rules for the browser to parse the page with. A DOCTYPE, or Document Type Definition defines all of the valid "rules", per se, of the document. These "rules" include the valid tags, attributes, and element nesting. So, as you would imagine, adding a DOCTYPE is an extremely important part of your page if you want everything to be interpreted correctly.

Originally posted by Booooze
does Style count as XHTML?Do you mean "do I define styles in XHTML?" If so, the answer is no. The key purpose of XHTML is get away from all presentational markup which then forces you to use CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) to separate content from style.

Originally posted by Booooze
Is there a difference between xhtml meta tags and html metatags?There are two differences. For one, you must close it since it's an "empty" tag. This is done by adding a trailing slash at the end of the tag. Note that all "empty" tags (such as <img>, <input>, etc.) must be closed in order to comply with the DOCTYPE. The second difference is the MIME type used. In HTML the MIME type is text/html, however, in XHTML the correct MIME type is application/xhtml+xml. The tag would end up looking like this:<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=iso-8859-1" />Also note that you should use some type of server-side script to check the HTTP_ACCEPT HTTP headers and send application/xhtml+xml Content-Type headers if the client supports it.

Originally posted by Booooze
Will using tables for my layout be A BIG DEAL?Yes. Using tables for layout is an extremely bad idea. There have been quite a few in-depth threads on it here, so they're really just a search away. There have also been quite a few articles written on it such as this one (http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/). The main reasons why you wouldn't want to use tables are: Slower page rendering time. The <table> element is the hardest element for a browser to render when specific widths and heights are not specified (which is most of the time). It ruins accessibility. JAWS and other screen readers have a much harder time reading content within a table. Your code becomes harder to manage. When you start to nest tables and such, the code becomes incredibly hard to read and maintain. Non-graphical browsers can't access content. Browsers in which cannot render graphical page elements will not be able to access your content.These are just a few reasons, I will assure you there are more. When using a CSS-based layout none of the problems listed above will apply.

Originally posted by Booooze
Can you help me? Sure, we can all help you. What do you need to know?

[Booooze]

thank you very much, i really appreciate all of this information that you have given me as i didnt know very much of it at all.

what i would like to ask is could you go to my site and look for "improper code" etc. .... but as you said it's quite hard to read when you use tables...so, i'm not quite sure what to do....for starters, should i try and put in a "unicode' or somethin? like the language or w/e?, because mayb i cant get some feedback from that wc3 validation engine? and 1 more thing, how do you make your site "look good" in a search engine? will tables effect that?
thx

[Vladdy]

Search engines "see" your site pretty much the same as a text browser:
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cptestcentral.vze.com%2F

I do not see anything there worth indexing.

First step is getting rid of frames, tables and depreciated tags. Use semantically meaningful mark-up (correctly hested headers, lists, etc), avoid inline styles and minimize the use of <div>s and <span>s - that will increase "signal to noise ratio" of your content.

[toicontien]

1. You don't need a doctype. If you're designing with web standards in mind, then yes for the same reason that fredmv said. There's nothing worse than trying to design a page using CSS and viewing it in Internet Explorer running in quirks mode.

2. The <style> tag is a part of the XHTML doctype. That's about as X and the style tag gets. A thread has been started about HTML vs XHTML. It's got some interesting stuff in it:

http://forums.webdeveloper.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18335

3. I've never run into a need to change the <meta> tag content-type. I use the following meta tag in my XHTML documents and they validate at http://validator.w3.org (which means little more than my documents are "well-formed").

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

The only benefit of having an application/xml+xhtml content type is in the header of the file sent by the web server. Mozilla 1.4+ and Opera 7.2+ will then process the XHTML document in an XML processor which speeds up rendering times. Again, see the thread about XHTML vs HTML.

4. No, tables aren't a BIG deal... yet. More and more sites are going to CSS layouts. I recently visited www.macromedia.com and they use an all-CSS layout now with no tables. There is nothing illegal about laying out pages with tables. That may change in the future, though:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/politics/

US state, local and federal government sites are required to comply with accessibility guidelines, which all but require utilizing a CSS layout. There may come a day when the same requirements are placed on private and commercial sites.

On the issue of tables vs CSS:

http://forums.webdeveloper.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10167&highlight=table

Table-based sites are accessible to search engine spiders. Many people will tell you otherwise, the fact is over 99% of the WWW uses table-based layouts and search engines seem to find these sites OK.

The issue with your site is that if you haven't paid to get on search engines, they can take months to get around to indexing your site. And when they finally do, they usually don't do as good a job as when you pay the search engine to index your site.

It's the nature of the beast. Search engines are run by companies that need to make money :rolleyes:

[Booooze]

interesting.
well, for me, changing my site to css wouldnt be to hard, once i got started. as for the search engines, and Vladdy, im not sure what to do. first of all i can't pay to be indexed(im 14 years old) and i have waited about 3 months for my old site to be indexed(which is y i gave up on it because google said it doesnt like frames). so....1 thing, Vladdy, y did u say there was nothing there worth indexing? is it the code? and as for <div> and <span>, isn't that quite common to use, div is used alot in css. right?

and..i did take a look at the html vs xhtml, its kinda over my head.

thx

[pyro]

Since Google actually reads through the content of ones site, rather than allowing itself to be spammed by meta tags, it is very important that your content is accessible to it. Think of google as a blind user (indeed, the biggest blind user of the web). If your pages are accessible to text readers (such as Lynx) the search engines will be able to read it. My personal site uses semantic XHTML for structural markup and CSS for presentation. If you were to take a look at it in Lynx (link in my sig) you'd see that all the content is still readable and available. That site was indexed by Google about a week after I released it.

toicontien, I'm assuming you must be talking about search engines other than Google? Google does not allow you to pay to increase your rank. Or, maybe you were talking about their AdWords?

[Booooze]

ok, so, heres a question...should i change my site to CSS, or do you think i can get google to index it? im getting a bit off topic and becoming a lil confused and i wanna get this site up and going cause i gotta get back to my VB programming. will it be easy to get my site into google or wat? like....what should i be changing, or should i just change my whole site to CSS because of the tables?

thx

[Vladdy]

Adding to pyro's post:
<div> and <span> are generic elements, which do not have any semantical meaning. You use them to group certain area of your page, such as <div id="navigation">, but overusing them creates more noise than signal. Ideally, your initial mark-up would have no generic tags.
You need to make sure that you have correctly nested header tags, use lists for navigation, etc.

I second pyro's experience with google. My new site (see sig) got indexed within a week.

[toicontien]

toicontien, I'm assuming you must be talking about search engines other than Google? Google does not allow you to pay to increase your rank. Or, maybe you were talking about their AdWords?
Nope. Thinking about other search engines.

[Paul Jr]

Originally posted by Booooze
...should i just change my whole site to CSS because of the tables?


Yes.

I'm currently converting a table-based layout to CSS, and it's really not that difficult -- at least this one isn't.

P.S., the site is not mine. I don't use tables anymore!!! Never did, really... not for the layout anyway...

[Booooze]

ok, ill convert my site to css, this is going to be fun...owell, at least i learned something, thx alot guys, hopefully i wont have to come back here for my help, i just want my site up and running. this site has been a promise to myself since the summer. anyways, im hopin to c it goin, thx again, u guys r great, ill ttyl, bye