Saturday, March 22, 2008

Frames and search engines

It's very difficult to get a good rankings on search engines if your web site uses frames.

The problem is that search engines do not index framed web sites well. Actually, the search engines do such a poor job of indexing frames that we recommend rebuilding your web site without them. For some search engines, rebuilding your site without frames is the only way to get a good ranking.

If you must use frames on your Web site for some reason, make sure you use the NoFrames tag so that search engines can find some text to index. The NoFrames tag is a tag specifically for search engines that cannot read the actual pages in your frame set.

Some search engines will be able to index the text you enter in the NoFrames tag. The contents you enter there should be text that is related to your site. It should contain your most important keyword phrases, but should remain readable to your Web site visitors.

You should place the NoFrames tag just before the </frameset> tag in your frameset, for example:

<frameset cols="25%,*" border="1">
<frame src="this.html" name="this">
<frameset rows="*,5*">
<frame src="that.html" name="that">
<frame src="whatever.html" name="whatever">
</frameset>
<noframes>
<body>
<h1>All about fishing equipment</h1>
If you're looking for fishing equipment, you'll find it
here. We offer rods, reels, lines, flies, waders, vests
and apparel, tubes and boats and more.
<p><a href="this.html">More about fishing equipment</a>
</body>
</noframes>
</frameset>

An easy way to do this is to create a new not framed web page for your site that describes your products and services. Often the content can be taken directly from one of your existing framed pages.

Once you've created the new page, view the HTML source of the page and copy everything from within the <body> and </body> tags. Then paste the new content within the <body> and </body> tags found within the NoFrames tags of your frameset.

Note that the text between NoFrames tags in our example contains a link to the main frame set page. That way, Web surfers with older browsers that don't support frames will also be able to visit the page.

Don't use a list of keywords within the NoFrames tags and don't try to overuse this tag because the search engines might penalize your web site for that.

Even if you use the NoFrames tag, it's still difficult to get a good ranking for a web site that uses frames.

If at all possible, avoid frames on your site.

No comments: