With some basic HTML tweaking webpages can be made more Search Engine Friendly i.e more relevant in the eyes of a Search Engine, this articles teaches you how to do just that.

Suppose you have a website with 2 sections,
1. The Left Section : Which usually contains menu items, ads, some promotional offers etc.
2. The Main Content Area : Which contains the main textual content of the website.

Below is the basic template.

LEFT SECTION
ITEM1
ITEM2
ITEM3

Main Body

HTML used for the sample above.

<table width="80%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
   <td>
    <b>LEFT SECTION</b><br>
     ITEM1<br>
     ITEM2<br>
     ITEM3<br>
   </td>
   <td bgcolor="#D9BBBB" rowspan="2" valign="top">
          Main Body
   </td>
</tr>
</table>

Notice, the content of The Left Section appears above The Main Content Area in the source, a Search Engine may thus give more importance / preference to left section of your webpage then your actual content area.

The above structure can be improved for search engine optimization purposes.

The 'Rowspan' attribute of the <td> can be used to solve the above problem. Using rowspan=2 divide the page into two rows, put The Main Content text in the first row, above the Left section, which should be put in the second row.

Optimized HTML Structure

<table width="80%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
   <td height="1">
   </td>
   <td bgcolor="#D9BBBB" rowspan="2" valign="top">
          Main Body
   </td>
</tr>
<tr>
   <td>
    <b>LEFT SECTION</b><br>
     ITEM1<br>
     ITEM2<br>
     ITEM3<br>
   </td>
</tr>
</table>

Optimized Output

Main Body

LEFT SECTION
ITEM1
ITEM2
ITEM3