Everyone knows that part of good search engine optimization can be the provision of facts and figures to support the arguments made in one's cleverly enhanced keyword copy. This can include providing facts and statistics that sometimes also need to be included in the form of a graph.
Making graphs can be a bit of an obsessive job for some web masters. It seems like you can always add another cell or a category. The major piece of advice if you are tempted to make a complicated table to support your copy is do not. The simpler the graphic table on your site is, the easier it will be for the search engine spiders to read.
The fact is that search engine spiders are actually not able to read all kinds of graphics, script and animation but in theory they can technically read the information that you put inside a table. The key is to not embed your information too deeply into the table. Most expert SEO web designers claim that search engine spiders will only read information that is embedded three times into a table. Once a design is more than three tables deep the search engine spiders tend to get very confused by it and the result is an ignored page or one that is dumped into some kind of page purgatory (like Google's sandbox.) The worst-case scenario is that you end up with a website that never really makes it to the search engine listing.
So to summarize – if you are going to use a table to illustrate a point or describe facts or figures on your website make sure you keep it simple and do not make it more than three cells deep as that is the maximum amount of information that the spiders can handle when reading this type of graphic.