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Search Engine Articles
Frames and Search Engines
By Sumantra Roy
When it comes to framed sites and the effect that the use of frames by a site
has on its search engine ranking, there are two schools of thought. Some people
say that framed sites, if done properly, have no problems in getting good
rankings in the search engines. Others claim that if search engine optimization
is important to you, never use frames.
In my opinion, the truth lies somewhere in between. Yes, the use of frames does
throw up a few issues when it comes to getting good rankings in the search
engines which don't understand frames. Hence, when you are designing a new site,
I would recommend that you avoid using frames, unless you have a specific reason
for doing so. However, if you already have a site which uses frames, all is not
lost. You can still get good rankings in the search engines even though you have
used frames. Furthermore, using frames also has its own advantages when it comes
to search engine placement, as we shall later on. This article assumes that you
have a working knowledge of frames. For more information on frames, click here.
In case your site uses frames, the key to getting good rankings lies in using
the NOFRAMES tag. The NOFRAMES tag is intended to help framed web sites display
some content for those people who are using non frames enabled browsers. The
search engines which don't understand frames also look at the NOFRAMES tag.
Hence, if you are using frames, you need to add content to the NOFRAMES tag.
What you should do is to add a complete web page within the NOFRAMES tag. Ensure
that this page repeats the important keywords for your site a number of times.
Also, in order to ensure that the content within the NOFRAMES tag is as
prominent as possible to the search engines, you should put the NOFRAMES tag
right after the FRAMESET tag. However, don't put the NOFRAMES before the
FRAMESET tag. If you do that, Internet Explorer will display your site correctly
but Netscape will display the content present in the NOFRAMES tag, rather than
the content present within the frames. Furthermore, you should also place a link
to the page containing your navigation links in the NOFRAMES tag. This ensures
that the search engines are able to spider the internal pages in your site.
Here's what the source code of your page might look like:
html
head
[title]Put an attractive title which contains keywords[/title]
[meta name="description" content="Put an attractive description
which also contains keywords"]
[meta name="keywords" content="Your target keywords separated by
commas"]
[/head]
[frameset border="0" cols="150,75%"]
[noframes]
[body]
[h1]Heading containing keywords[/h1]
[p]Here, you should add a lot of content and should repeat your keywords a
number of times.
[p]More keyword rich text for the search engines.
[a href="left.html">Link to page containing navigation links[/a]
[/body]
[/noframes]
[frame src="left.html" name="left" scrolling="no"
noresize]
[frame src="main.html" name="main"
scrolling="auto"]
[/frameset]
[/html]
One problem that occurs when you use frames is that the search engines may often
display one of the internal pages in your site in response to a query. If this
internal page does not contain a link to the home page of your site, the user
will be unable to navigate through your entire site. The solution, of course, is
to add a link to the home page from that internal page. When the visitor clicks
on that link, she is brought within the context of the frames.
However, simply adding a link to the home page presents yet another problem. If
the visitor had already been viewing that page within the context of the frames
and then clicks on the link to the home page, a new set of frames will be
created in addition to the frames already being used. In order to solve this
problem, you have to use the TARGET = "_top" command in the link, i.e.
the HTML code for the link would be something like
Wrapping things up:
As I mentioned earlier, there is also an advantage to using frames. Since most
Internet users are now using frames enabled browsers, it means that not many
people are going to know what's present in your NOFRAMES tag. This allows you
the repeat your keywords a few more times in the NOFRAMES than what you could
have done if you were writing a page which humans would also see (of course,
don't repeat the keywords too many times - that can cause your web site to be
penalized for spamming). You can also avoid using tables, graphics etc. which
you would otherwise need to use if humans would also view that page. However, it
is debatable whether this small advantage is sufficient to justify using frames.
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This article may be re-published as long as the following resource box is
included at the end of the article and as long as you link to the email address
and the URL mentioned in the resource box:
Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized
search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more articles on
search engine placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by
sending a blank email to mailto:1stSearchRanking.999.99@optinpro.com or by going
to http://www.1stSearchRanking.net
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