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February 15, 1998
Avoid Pitfalls with Frames
While frames can make Web site design and the navigation of a site a bit easier, they wreak havoc on your Web site's ranking in the search engines for two reasons:
1. Half of the search engines cannot read the content contained in frames.
2. Frames increase the file size, the number of total words that make up the Web site, and thereby can decrease keyword weight.
These non-frames capable search engines view the Web site just as if you were viewing your site with an outdated browser. If your site is indexed and you use frames you may end up with many pages with these types of entries:
something.com/whatever.htm
We carry lots of widgets. This web page uses frames; please upgrade your browser to view this page.
something.com/other.htm
We carry lots of widgets. This web page uses frames; please upgrade your browser to view this page.
What happened here? This company's web site is listed but probably not found for any keywords in the search engines. Why? Simple, the search engine's spider couldn't read frames. Therefore, it only read the contents of the <NOFRAMES> tag - and it is not very compelling text for search engine ranking or for a potential visitor who sees this type of entry in a search engine.
Typically, this information is returned to browsers that are not frames capable instead of just returning a jumbled page. Unfortunately, the text in the <NOFRAMES> tag often gives instruction to the reader that they need a frames capable browser to view the site properly as well.
So, how do you overcome this problem?
First, if at all possible, do not design your Web site with frames.
If you insist on using frames, take measures to ensure that your page can be indexed by the major search engine's spiders. You can accomplish this by carefully using the <NOFRAMES> tag. Don't forget effective site titles and meta tags. Just because you're using frames doesn't mean you should leave out other essential elements of the page design. It's really quite simple. You must create an alternate Web page within the <NOFRAMES> tag such that search engines have at least something to index. And if your customers are sent to this page, they can still understand and/or view your pages.
Compose a complete HTML Web page between the <NOFRAMES> and its end tag, the </NOFRAMES> tags and make sure you include the NOFRAMES tag immediately below the very first frameset tag, because, as always, you want the keyword rich text to appear as close to the top of the page as possible like so:
<FRAMESET COLS="125,*" border="0">
<NOFRAMES>
<BODY>
<H1>I'll start the content in my NOFRAMES tag with a header tag that will include my keywords</H1>
<P>
In the copy you can include all the text and HTML that would otherwise make up this page of your Web site.
Here's a link to another page, maybe one that would make up another frame:
<A HREF="http://www.yourcompany.com/otherpage.htm">Click to link to another page</A>
<P>
And here's some more text for the search engines to index
</BODY>
</NOFRAMES>
<FRAME SRC="html/lftmenu.htm" NAME="frame517420" MARGINWIDTH=3 SCROLLING=NO NORESIZE>
<FRAME SRC="html/main.html" NAME="main" SCROLLING=YES>
</frameset>
The preferred method is to include all the information from the other framed pages on this new, separate page contained in the <NOFRAMES> tag. When you design this new Web page within the <NOFRAMES> tag, make sure you include links to other pages in your site so that the search engine can Spider to those pages and index them as well.
Make sure <NOFRAMES> follows the <FRAMESET> tag. Moving it up higher in the page such as in the <HEAD> section could make your wording more prominent to the search engine but would be incompatible with some browsers and engines.
Since the extra tags to set up frames may dilute the density of keywords versus other words on the page, you should definitely consider creating a normal, non-framed site and/or create only certain portions of your site in frames. This way you may be able to provide the best of both worlds to your site's visitors.
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