Last week the Network Solutions team traveled to New Orleans, LA for the ECMTA/PeSA Spring Summit. Part of our participation in the Summit was in the form of Web site evaluations for attendees. During one such consultation, a situation came up that presented a learning opportunity…

The consultation was with a photographer. He is a very successful photographer already, and is always looking for ways to increase his customer base, expand his business and do so in the most cost effective manner. In an effort to make his Web presence even stronger, he hired a Web designer to build his new site. Thousands of dollars, time and effort went into the new site, which is very attractive, indeed. However, the site was designed entirely in frames and this may put any serious SEO effort in jeopardy.

There are some design techniques that should be avoided and using frames is one of them.

What exactly are frames? Technically, it is a technique where multiple html documents are displayed in one browser. To an end user, the browser is displaying only one Web page, but to the browser (and possibly search bots) there are multiple pages being displayed. Imagine looking at a Web page where the top image is one frame, the left hand navigation is another frame and the main body is yet another. Technically, these are all separate html documents. To a user, only one Web page is displayed in the browser.

So what’s the problem for SEO?

Think about how a spider works. The spider grabs a url, breaks it down into its component pieces to analyze them for ranking. These pieces include the title tag, meta description, headline and many others. Another of these components is a list of all the links on a page. Those links, in turn, are put into queue to be spidered.

So if a bot comes to a frame site, it may only see the html document that is the body – it may not see any of the links on the page at all, if they are in an html doc that was not spidered. If the bot does not see any links, it cannot crawl the site and thus, will not be able to rank any of the pages. Or, depending on the browser, the bot may not see any of the body copy at all. If the bot does not see any content, that page will not likely get a good ranking.

There are several ways that you can optimize a frame Web site for search engines. The techniques are intuitive, though there will probably be a learning curve. You’ll have to fully understand how the search engines work in order to properly implement the necessary fixes. There is an excellent article on how frames interact with search engines over at searchenginewatch.com. Though it’s about a year old now, the concepts are still accurate.

I know some fantastic designers. I’ve seen some sites that I thought for sure were all flash, only to find out that an extremely talented designer created the pages with html and an obsessive use of CSS. Same thing with frames - in most cases you can create the same or similar effect without them. You can do so much with good clean code; I am hard pressed to think of an example where you should use frames.

If you’re pursuing a new Web site design, it’ll be best to avoid design techniques that could have a detrimental effect on your search rankings. Sure, there are ways around the potential detriment, but why risk it?