Lesson #12 Layers of Optimization: Getting Around Frames
Written By Cyndalie

In this lesson we will uncover the advantages and disadvantages to optimizing framesets and frames web sites. Frames are usually regarded by new search engine optimizers as a limitation. Most people who only know a little bit about marketing in the search engines think they are bad to have around and will try to avoid them when developing new sites.

I have often thought that if there are cons to a technique or design type there must be pros as well. I have experimented with frames sites in the search engines and have found that there are, in fact, several advantages to frames and even the limitations can be used to your benefit, particularly when optimizing for different types of engines.

Advantages to Frames
The biggest advantage to frames sites is the <noframes> part of your code. This is especially important for the home page when optimizing a site because you as an SEO can create the perfect search engine friendly page for the spiders to read without appearance or design issues to worry about!

Sometimes when optimizing sites that are not Frames sites, where I am unable to embellish or modify the design of the home page of the site to make it heavy in relevant content containing text and links to the other main pages of the site, I will frame the main page anyway in an invisible frameset! Why? So I can include relevant text and links to the other main pages of the site, which are optimized of course. If the main page is just a graphical interface menu, you need to add content to that page for ranking, beyond Alt, Comment, and Meta Tags, especially if you are aiming for highly competitive keywords. You can also hide from the viewer incoming and out going links for relevance, keyword content, and intra linking techniques.

In addition to gaining the ability to create a search engine friendly page without worrying about aesthically pleasing the user and focusing on giving the engines exactly what they want, other advantages to framesets are as follows: The location bar does not change or deviate from url the frameset originally loaded in. Since the second frame is not visible, the user is unaware they are within a framed page, therefore they will not know if they click on a URL that takes them outside the site, nor will they be able to backtrack through URL strings which can have security disadvantages for dynamic sites. Lastly, traffic numbers can increase because you are calling 2 or 3 pages at one time rather than 1. Page view numbers can be easily fudged so unless there is a particular reason why this would be an advantage for you, simply fudging traffic numbers can be unethical - especially if you use those numbers to sell traffic, impressions, or advertising.

Not familiar with framesets or invisible framesets? To learn more in depth on using this technique please refer to The Fusion of Marketing and Design: Creating Search Engine Friendly Web Sites by yours truly located at AdultChamber.com, originally published at Ynot.com.

Limitations to Frames
The biggest limitation to frames site is the fact that if the pages inside the frames can be spidered by the search engines and indexed individually, making them, in most cases, un-navigable for users who enter your site from the engine to that page. When this happens down the road, especially of those pages inside a frame set are content heavy. How to avoid this from happening? Adding the tag <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> with your meta tags can help prevent the pages from being indexed. You can also modify your Robots.txt file if you know how. (See Search Engine Overview: Terminology). In this case you may need to create an optimized frame set that contains the content of each page, for each main page to link to. Ideally you can include links that will take them back into the framed site if they enter through an interior page. "Our of frames?" link are often utilized for this purpose. Also including text links at the foot of each page can help them get where they want to be not matter where they enter.

Again I must reinforce that you cannot be a successful webmaster or marketer if you do not have a strong understanding of HTML and basic web design concepts. I usually recommend Dreamweaver for implementing most types of coding tricks, but I have found Dreamweaver has a limitation to creating and manipulating frame sites and sets. When working with frames sites I recommend using Microsoft's Front Page to create the frameset and a note pad type of editor like Note Tab Light to manipulate your code when updating sites. Ultimately, strong HTML skills learned with experience will become your best friend and bridge to understanding other programming languages.