SEO And Frames

Search Engine Friendly Framed Sites

If you have decided that creating a framed site is more to your liking than a standard page site, then this article should give you some ideas for proper framed site design. While it is true that search engines do have more problems with framed sites than standard page sites, you should first decide how important search engines are to your site.

If your business is primarily regional in scope, investing heavily in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) may be counter productive. Your best bet may be to invest in local media advertising that always includes your web site address. True, even a local business can benefit from a good search engine page ranking and listing; therefore, it is always a good idea to optimize each page of you site the best that you can.

Here are a few suggestions that can help regardless of whether you create a framed or standard page site.

Domain Name
If you have any input on the domain name, select one that reflects what your site is going to promote or sell. If the site is for a company, the domain name should be the company’s name - if possible. Complete word domain names are easier to remember than cryptic names unless you can come up with an attention-getting abbreviation. (myfirstsite.com is easier to remember than mfs.com)

Page Title (Limit to 60 characters, including spaces)
Make sure the<TITLE> of each page accurately reflects the contents of that page. If it is a navigation or a frameset page, label the page as such but create a robot.txt file that tells the engines not to index the page. From what I have been able to research, Google doesn’t seem to use the Meta tag for robots but does look for and obey the instructions in the robot.txt file.

NOTE:
The robot.txt file can be used to exclude a file or a directory for search engine indexing; however, the file does not allow for having a file not indexed but the links followed. Use the Meta tag to accomplish this.

Place the page title as the number one page element right after the <HEAD> tag. Try to include at least one keyword used in your META tags keywords and your page content in the page title. The page title tag is very important because this is what the engines will use to list your page so if it says something like "My Home Page" try to be more specific. Change it to include your site’s name and be more specific about what content is on the page.

Site Map Page
Including a site map page where the search engines can easily find it ensures most of your main pages will end up being indexed. However, even if you do get listed, unless your site is unique, it will be one of hundreds in the same category. Regardless of what you do, getting a top 10 listing in any one category is difficult, keeping a top listing can be very time consuming. Therefore, it is important to consider how much a top listing is worth. If a top listing is important then it may be cheaper and easier to buy a preferred listing.

Before submitting you site, carefully read the article on Meta tags and check all of the tags on each of your pages; this includes your navigation pages and your frameset pages.

<NoFrames> Area
One other area that must be addressed on framed sites is the <noframes> tag area of all frameset pages. While Google claims to no longer read the <noframes> tag area, other search engines do. Therefore, include a good description of your site there. The best way is to copy the first paragraph of your home page into the <noframes> area. Now, include a site map to all main pages. Include this same information on all frameset pages. Make sure the <noframes> site map links connect only to the contents pages and not to framesets. This way the individual pages will be crawled and listed.

(Edited July10,2003: According to Google/Webmasters and Jill at High Rankings, Google does read the <noframes> tag area. I thought I read this on the Google site but I must have been dreaming or trusted an incorrect source. If you go to the High Rankings site, be sure to subscribe to Jill's newsletter if you're serious about optimizing your site and keeping up to date on what search engines are doing.)

Wrap Up
Now that you have all your pages, including navigation pages and frameset pages, have their correct page title and Meta tags, you are ready to submit your site to the search engines. First, submit to directories that use humans to review your site because humans can easily navigate a framed site. The problem with directories is they usually are slower than search engine crawlers and human indexers may not use any of your carefully selected keywords or your page descriptions.

In order to test your optimization techniques on search engines, (suggestion from <codepunk>) build several 10 to 15 page sites, using frames and standard pages. I suggest more than one page because search engines may tend to ignore one or two page sites as unimportant. Submit each site to your favorite search engines and observe how they are listed and ranked. Play with the keywords, descriptions, and page contents while observing how the changes affect your listings and page rankings.

In my experience, Google takes approximately 2 months to crawl your site the first time, so be patient. Another good tip is to update your home page and add or change pages to your site at least once every two weeks. By making frequent changes, most search engines will detect the changes and crawl your site more frequently.