July 4, 2008

Search Engine Optimisation of a site using frames

Some Web Design Basics:

A frameset is a web page which acts as a placeholder for other web pages. A common use would be to have a navigation page in one 'frame' which retains a constant page position, whilst the content in a second frame allows the user to scroll down, whilst keeping the navigation visible.

Frames can act as a barrier to some search engines being able to crawl your pages and index your content. The frameset acts like a wrapper and the spider just can't get in !

Solutions

There is a special 'noframes' area in a frame based page. By carefully placing html content in the noframes area, and linking to the pages on your site it is possible to allow your site to be crawled.
An alternative method would be to recode your site so as to not use frames - many sites use frames without any real need for the site to be done in that way.

Orphaned pages

Having successfully optimised your frame based site for the search engines, there is still a further problem - orphaned pages !
 
Your frames based site has one frame for navigation, and all the different content pages appear in another "content" frame. The search engines will return the individual content pages in isolation from their frameset. This is a major problem, as once we have enticed the user to your site, without the navigation frame, they have no way of seeing any of your other pages!

With a small piece of web code, we can ensure a page always appears in it's intended frameset, allowing the user full access to all of your content.

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