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Before I start does anyone have any SEO tips for making sure the site does as well as possible in the rankings?
Or am I kidding myself, and there is no way I am going to get any ranking at all off a frames site?
If you must use frames, make sure that you include a NoFrames tag, because not all search engines can read frames content (but they can all read the NoFrames tag).
Within that tag you need to put :
1) a description of your site, utlising key search phrases. This could be the only text about your site that a search engine reads, so make the most of it.
2) a message for visitors to your site whose browsers cannot read frames. The most common message here is something like : "If you are viewing this page, your browser cannot read frames, please get the latest version of your browser from : [insert URL here]".
3) a way for search engine robots (and visitors who become "frame trapped") to get to the rest of your site. Best way to do that is to create a flat HTML site map, containing a link to every page on your site and inserting a link to that site map within the NoFrames tag.
There is an excellent tutorial on optimizing for frames-based sites here : [searchenginewatch.com...]
Best of luck!
I find this such an interesting subject - I have worked as an SEO for three years now. The problem is, I have worked as an SEO for a web site design firm - the emphasis has always been on design and not search engine ranking. The SEO department was (until recently), simply used to get a retainer fee from the design clients.
As a result of this, SEO has always been an afterthought. I would say that 99% of our web sites have been constructed with frames, and we have always just had to put up with them.
However, I actually prefer framed sites - there is SO much scope for highly optimised text in the noframes section, unlike the static pages of a site where there is often no control over copy.
I don't actually have any figures, but I would imagine that a very small percentage of people actually use non-frames-capable browsers these days, meaning that you basically have a completely free-reign over the content (i.e. it doesn't necessarily matter if the keyword-rich content isn't 100% gramatically correct as hardly anyone will see it).
I don't mean going silly and blatantly spamming; just provide the search engine spiders with what they need - quality content and links to as many other pages of the site as possible to make their job easier.
I normally copy in at least all of the keyword-rich text that can be found on the site with a little tweaking to increase keyword density. The search engines have NEVER had any problems with this, and I find that generally, the page with the frameset / noframes code achieves at least the same or better rankings than the static pages from the site which are promoted.
I consider this to be a legitimate, non-spamming technique.
Just an opinion - any thoughts?
Borny.
If the content files were separate from design elements you could insert the content files in your <noframes> tags using include statements, couldn't you? Since they aren't often viewed by real humans, it wouldn't matter if they weren't super attractive. It would prevent you having to write new markup for <noframes> also.
<added>this is what I do in combination with a frames redirect (if page is listed on a SE out of its frameset) and several pages are in #1 positions</added>
