Sometimes, the technologies you use to build your website can do severe damage to your chances of a high ranking. When this happens, it’s usually a surprise. After all, you don’t expect the very material your site is made of to be the central cause of a diving PageRank. One of the design technologies that has long been a problem for SEO is the use of frames.

Frames became very popular quite a few years ago now, and have somewhat gone out of fashion. Although web designers have definitely gone off frames, you will still come across the odd site on the net that makes use of them. This is because frames, which essentially split your page into separate sections that act as pages on their own, are useful for some kinds of sites. It’s possible that you might find yourself in a position where you need to use a frame.

Different SEO companies will have different fallback plans for frames, and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about the methods available for your site. Like any other SEO issue, there are some old standard techniques that are favourites. The three top solutions for the frame problem on a website are:

1. Work your ‘no frames’ tags. Your <NOFRAMES> tag can be used with your frames code to reveal any information the search engines might have missed. In basic terms, all of the content in the various frames on the page needs to be copied and pasted into a single, unframed, coded document. This is done by copying the navigation frames and body frames and working them into the main frame for the page. The content needs to be put between ‘noframes’ tags to let the search engines know that this is content a user would be seeing inside frames.
2. Redirects. There are times when a ‘no frames’ tag will not solve the problem. This is particularly true when users are unable to see the framed content due to their browser. This can mean that only the main frame is visible or, even worse, the user lands on an inner frame. If the user lands on an inner frame, they are likely to get stuck without navigation to the rest of the site. To cover this eventuality, it can be a good idea to embed code to redirect users to the main frame page. This needs to be put into each of the inner frames, as you can have no certainty where the user will land. This can create problems as well, as users who are automatically redirected to another page tend to get irritated.
3. Don’t use them in the first place. This may not sound like a solution to the average site owner, but it’s certainly considered a solution to most experts involved in SEO and web design. In finding another way to lay out your information, you can save yourself a whole lot of trouble. Unless you absolutely must have frames on your pages, avoiding them can be the best option of all.

Related posts:

1. SEO: Avoid The Frame Game
2. A Series On SEO And Common Pitfalls – Part One
3. Search Engine Optimisation and Link Quality
4. Ways to deter search engines
5. Roadblocks That Stop Search Engine Optimisation

Tags: frames, iframe, noframes, page rank, pagerank

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under SEO Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.