Forum Moderators: phranque
The situation is that I have a related company who has outsourced web design to company who's idea of a web site is frames and a flash animation and no text on the home page (luckily it's not a separate splash page)...and of course no <noframes> tag in sight...The whole site has probably 20 pages altogether. It's one of those static catalog/brochure sites, no e-commerce, just product descriptions, real simple.
I'm trying to get some unified SEO going among this group of companies, and since this site is new I made some suggestions. My first suggestion was to lose the frames. I gave them all the standard Jakob Nielsen Why Frames Suck [useit.com] arguments, but to no avail. Here's what this "web design" firm came back with:
“The rule of thumb is this: If the website is extremely high-traffic (i.e. millions of visitors a month), avoid the use of frames to keep the website compatible with the lowest common browser client. Like many of our fellow designers, Really Bad Websites, Inc. strongly promotes the use of frames to provide a stationary left-hand side menu, keeping navigation simple and intuitive.”So, now the local company thinks "we do not have “millions” of visitors a month, we do not have to worry about creating a site to be compatible with the lowest common browser client." keep me away from the sharp pointy sticks :(
Then I had gall to infer that the pretty Flash only home page might be the [url=www.webmasterworld.com/forum27/44.htm]"kiss of death"[/url] for Search Engines (since there is no text, or <noframes> tag). This got them riled a bit...
“Search engines provide a minimal amount of traffic to websites; most Websites receive less than ten percent of their visitors via search engines. One of the final stages of website development involves providing an updated robots.txt file, detailed metatags and "noframes" tags to facilitate search engine indexing. Please keep in mind that each search engine indexes websites in a completely different manner; many ignore meta tags altogether.:o At this point I'm really, really glad I live in a country with strict gun control laws :( Now the local company has this figure stuck in their heads, "less than 10% of Web site visitors are a result of search engines". Along these lines the local company is telling me that they should be driving their own sales objectives and promoting strategies that inform new (as well as existing) customers of their website and not relying on whether or not ALL visitors go to their site as a result of a search engines.I'm not clear at all as to why a small Flash animation is the "kiss of death" to a search engine. Technically, a spider program will ignore all embedded elements, including graphics and flash, focusing on HTML text only.
It's a common mistake to assume that search engines are important in driving qualified traffic to a website; offline (traditional) marketing is by far the most powerful mechanism to drive in qualified traffic.”
I tried to sit down and write a rebuttal to this inanity, but I kept typing in ALL CAPS and using profanity. Advice, suggestions, commiseration...all welcome.
I know my employer's site gets about half its visitors from search engines, and our site traffic has more than quadrupled (from around 1000 per month to over 5000 per month) since I ditched the frames and started playing the search engine game. Our sales have increased, and the number of our newletter subscribers and repeat visitors has skyrocketed. If you want to give them examples, there's one for you.
I'd ask them if 10% of the web traffic comes off the search engines then where does the rest come from?
Are they going to set-up banner ads everywhere and say that's the way to go? If so, then point them to Reuters, ZDnet, CNN, etc. and have them read all the latest news on how depended ad sales have killed a large portion of this industry.
I'd ask them if 10% of the web traffic comes off the search engines then where does the rest come from?According to them it's this:
Most of the traffic is generated by other methods (e.g. print advertising showing the Web site address, having your sales force direct customers/OEMS/distributors to your Web site, word of mouth, etc.).
I used to think that too. Back when I thought 40 hits a week was a good thing.
> high-traffic... avoid the use of frames to keep the website compatible with the lowest common browser client.
Relatively speaking, I doubt people have much trouble using all those popular, frameless sites (otherwise they wouldn't continue to be so popular). If frames really were better, some the popular sites would adopt them b/c the usability increase would outweigh support for version 1 & 2 browsers.
[hotwired.lycos.com...]
> most Websites receive less than ten percent of their visitors via search engines.
Murphy's Law of Statistics would undoubtedly state that a statistic is repeated in direct proportion to its ambiguity & uselessness.
print advertising - expensive
sales force - expensive
word of mouth - unreliable
Best of luck to you. Email a couple of messages to yourself, gradually replacing the profanity until you have a clean message to send. ;)
If the sales force, OEMs, and distributors are one of the main providers then what is the point of having a web site with Flash? If the sales force grabbed their attention then they will care less about some front door graphic and will be more concerned with the Prods and Servs. In fact it will probably tick them off for having to wait for it to load.
Bill, if you really need this client then keep trying.
If it's not too much of a worry then just tell them flat out: Ok, go with this design company and watch what happens(give them a LOL) and leave. After a month or two then i'm very sure they will be crying at your knees.
I only wish I could drop them! ;)
And if that company goes with that design company then they are going to listen to them and THEN ask you why the traffic isn't coming? Tough situation. Can't the parent company of this subsidiary back you up?
On the other hand, here's an old discussion that might help explain why Really Bad Websites, Inc. thinks the way it does, along with a link to a study that shows that 90% of info searches utilize search engines:
[webmasterworld.com...]
From my experience, some offline material does work-- for example big ads in major newspapers, face to face presentations with targeted groups, etc. This strategy also results in link referrals that wouldn't happen otherwise, as it's a push approach that goes out and gets 'em instead of opening channels for them to find you. But the nature of that type of promotion is short-lived: traffic will spike for a day and go back to normal. The only viable way customers can get back later is by using a search engine and to ignore this fact is uncompetitive at best and incompetent at worst.
Lastly, offline marketing is expensive, while search engines are cheap, or free. Why would a business choose to spend when it doesn't have to?
I turned one client around when they realized that they wouldn't be able to send people direftly to specific pages if they used frames.
Most of the traffic is generated by other methods (e.g. print advertising showing the Web site address, having your sales force direct customers/OEMS/distributors to your Web site, word of mouth, etc.).
This is the basis on which all high profile web design people operate in my country. Problem is, that they never tell the customer about the huge costs awaiting them in obtaining traffic this way. Launching a new site globally with the help of advertising and sales people would rquire $100 million at the very least.
All sites that I have built, or helped to build, derive between 50 and 90 percent of their traffic from search engines. At no or very little cost to the owner.
Having said that, I think you should ease up on frames, but stick to your guns on flash. If the frameset has 10-30 Kb of structured text and links to all pages in the noframes area, you will have no problems at all with frames in any engine. But, of course, the price is that every single page has to be equipped with its own navigation so that it can stand alone anyway, just as if it had not been a framed page.
If I remember Jakob Nielsen's objection correctly, it is that all of this is so easy to forget, that people forget it.
To follow the recomendations of this "design company" can only insure that the website will get no traffic from the search engines.
Lets use the 10% and a million hits a month. With no SE traffic you now have only 900,000 hits a month. Is this "design company" suggesting that it is acceptable to hangup the phone on ever tenth person that calls to enquire about the product or service? Is the company willing to give up 100,000 leads a month?
Bill, the main issue with the 10% figure is whether it is a percentage of new or total visitors. If it is a % of the total visitors, which I would suspect, then it stands to reason that the % of new visitors is very high. And, by definition, you don't get more total visitors without more new visitors.
I love the company name Really Bad Websites, Inc, it makes me chuckle.
Of course you need to take 3 extra steps if you want to suceed.
A- Make a site map (visible or not) linked to the home page and sitting at root level so robots can find all content pages.
B- Make one different frameset per page and feed well the noframes area.
C- Use an external JavaScript redirect for all content pages to open the proper frameset.
For Flash, I consider it is a good complement to a HTML site.
I have seen "research" claiming that less than 10% of referrals come from SEs also. As I understand it these figures are gathered by comparing total page impressions and referrals to pages that use a HitBox counter to record referrers URL. There are a couple of obvious flaws here :
1) HitBox counters would typically be placed on the home page only. Direct referral to an interior page wont count
2) ONLY sites with a HitBox counter could even possibly report these hits, and HitBox is hardly universal
3) Sites that use HitBox as thier stat tracking method tend to be smaller, cheaper and are therefore less likely to be highly visible on SEs anyway
These 3 points all ingore the other point that has been made previously, that of those 93% of non-SE referrals, many will be from people who bookmarked the site after finding it on an SE (from memory, the exact figures I saw were 7% SE referrals, 43% from direct navigation or bookmarks)
Basically, this blows the web design companies argument right out of the water ("lies, damned lies and statistics" anyone?). If you really want, I might be able to dig out a ref to where I picked this up from.
Realizing that my twisted humor may not translate into all languages, let me restate & reiterate that framed sites can hinder the natural forwarding & linking potential (viral marketing & link popularity, respectively) of deep pages.
(disclaimer: sean is not responsible for losses due to the conversion of a regular website to a framed website)
I suppose its possible that the web design company involved may honestly believe that people dont get many hits from search engines - because they have done a poor job in the past and havent therefore seen many referrals.
Ask them to produce substantiation on their claim of 10%.
Search engines, portals, and community sites have established themselves as a mandatory part of every surfers' online habits," NetRatings vice president Sean Kaldor said in a statement. "Nine out of every ten Web users go to such a site every month, and are going there more frequently - nearly five times monthly.Search Engines, Portals, Big Web Draws [newsbytes.com] - Nielsen
I have one client who came to me with a relatively small framed site, asking for more search engine traffic. As a first step, I "flattened" all the frames pages, keeping the exact same appearance, but now the nav and header scrolled off the page. A funny thing happened. Site stickiness (measured as page views per session) nearly doubled from the first day the flattened pages went online.
I highly suspect that only some people feel that frames are intuitive -- the rest of the population has a mindset that doesn't get it, for whatever reason. One frames-related usability problem is the lack of location cues in the static parts of the frameset. Nothing changes to give a "You Are Here" message.
firstly...ignore the statistics they provide...provide your own...X% of vistors to the sites I look after come from SEs...a rise of X places in the site's ranking on Google brought X visitors over the next X days...go for the throat and don't bother to rebut them
Frames can make sense on a graphics intensive site...so the question is why do they want to be graphics intensive?...what does this gain the customer?...if the frames are because they are a bunch of kids straight off a dead tree based graphic design course and they want absolute positioning, then just point out how ludicrous that idea is
Flash...an optional bit of Flash is OK as long as it is opt in...if the site aims to get return visitors then suggest the customer use the page as home page on their own browser for a few days...they'll soon get sick of it
finally...off line promotion...nothing beats editorial...it's free and it's more believable...so your off line promotion should be focused on that if at all possible...and the point about that is you aren't able to hammer the website address, you MUST be visible to the SEs to get any sgnificant benefit
HTH
I've had some of these arguments SO many times :(
I think small flash items that compliment text rich pages are good, but those all flash pages are invisible to SEs. I'm sure that sites that use flash and frames do not get much traffic from SEs and do get traffic from mailshots, advertising etc - but that is a self proving exercise - if they designed websites for SEs then I suspect their SE traffic would far outstrip their non SE traffic.
Here's an article from one of my newsletters about search engine referrals:
One Out of Every Three Americans Visits a Search Engine, Portal or Community Site, According to Nielsen//NetRatings
[biz.yahoo.com ]
