I recently read somewhere that it is more difficult for the spiders to crawl nested table data. Is this true? If so, does it affect optimization efforts enough to use a different coding method
Spiders have no problem w/ nested tables... It is, however, recommended that you use <div>s and CSS to format pages rather than using tables unless you really are trying to display some type of table of data. The idea is that generally speaking using <div>s causes the HTML source to be smaller so it downloads faster. Also, using <div>s instead of tables generally means you increase your content:code ratio... i.e. the HTML source will have a higher percentage of content and smaller percentage of "code" as a result of using <div>s. Supposedly this content:code ratio is a ranking factor for some of the engines. But like most SEO ranking factors, it likely carries little weight by itself in the overall scheme of things, and using <div>s versus tables is not likely to cause a significant change in rankings. Is just another "little thing" you can do to help... Lots of little things can make a difference.