Optimising Your Framed Site For Search Engines

One method that net designers can use to style and structure a web site is to use frames. However, if your internet website utilises frames then you’ll have major problems getting indexed within the search engines. Though website style using frames has lessen prominent with the increase in popularity of CSS, there are still sites out there utilising framesets. But there are ways that to sidestep the problem.

In the past, frames were considered a nice way for web site designers to quickly and easily show content whilst maintaining a structure throughout the location (e.g. by having a title, or navigation bar). They allow more than one HTML document to be shown on a page by displaying each one inside its own “frame”, that are outlined by the “frameset” HTML tag. This tag defines that pages to point out and the scale and position of the frame it should appear in. Though this sounds nice in theory, it creates problems with each navigation (and therefore search engine indexing) and usability.

As internet usability skilled Jakob Nielsen has documented on his website, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html, there are many usability issues related to frames:

They can be disorientating to users – if they click inside one frame and this affects another frame it can build navigation confusing.

The address bar does not change as the user navigates between pages, because the pages load inside the frameset. Once more, this will confuse and disorient users.

The loading time increases as a result of there’s more than one page to load. If the site takes too long to load then guests are going to go elsewhere instead.

If a user bookmarks a page at intervals the site, they can be sent to the default frameset once they revisit rather than the bookmarked page.

On high of this, there also are issues with search engines finding and indexing all of a framed site’s pages. The foremost elementary problem is that search engines find and index pages by following HTML links during a document, and because framesets reference a page rather than linking to it, the pages at intervals the framed web site can’t be reached. Ultimately, this implies that regardless of how giant a website is there is a possibility that solely the frameset page will be indexed.

There is a method spherical this problem. You’ll place a “noframes” tag within the body of your frameset page to provide different content that will be displayed if the browser is not frames compatible. Fortunately, search engines can also scan this tag, therefore if you include traditional links inside this tag the search engines can spider them sort of a traditional site. Visit http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_noframes.asp for a lot of info on the noframes tag.

Thus now the search engines can realize your pages, but what happens when your guests realize them?

As a result of the frameset dictates that pages should be loaded, if an enclosed page is accessed directly through a look engine then it can be loaded outside the context of the frameset. This suggests {that the} page can be viewed on its own without any of the meant accompanying pages specified by the frameset, such as a navigation bar. This kind of page is referred to as an “orphan” page. They are confusing for visitors because once they notice the page they will not be ready to navigate the positioning, meaning you’ll end up losing the visitor, or worse, a customer.

Again, there is a way around this issue. You’ll be able to use JavaScript to force the page into its framed context, and though this causes problems with JavaScript incompatible browsers it does neatly avoid the orphaned page issue. There is a great tutorial offered at http://www.webreference.com/js/column36/forcing.html showing how this is done.

There are alternatives to frames that permit for similar functionality, the foremost widespread would be to position parts on a page using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), or if you are planning a dynamic site then utilising Server Facet Includes (SSI) would be a sensible option. Though the on top of shows a way to avoid the complications caused by frames, for the varied stated reasons it might be higher to avoid them altogether.

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