Framed and Forgotten
I met a businessman recently who was lamenting that their website never gets any traffic. It’s been on the Internet for five years and doesn’t receive more than a half dozen views a week. This is, unfortunately, a common problem with small businesses. The problem usually comes down to lack of content, irrelevancy (outdated content), or the design itself.
In this gentleman’s case, it was the skeleton under the design. This company’s entire site was built with frames. Frames are an outdated technology and basically death for SEO. A much better option is to use div tags and CSS. (All of Kinetics Web Pro’s sites are built in this manner, for OPTIMUM Google-friendliness.)
You may be wondering, WHY are frames so bad for a website? Search engines struggle with frames; they err by sending your visitors to the wrong page, or to a page without any real content. The way a framed page is set up, there is a separate frame for the title, navigation, each element of the content, etc., plus a master frameset which is supposed to dictate the layout of the pages and provide that information to search engines. The problem is, search engines can’t read frames, so only the non-frame content is returned as a “hit.” If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute! If the whole page is made up of frames, WHAT non-frame content?” You must be half Nerd; more on NOFRAME content in a moment…
A search engine thinks of these frames as separate pages. Not only is it confusing to a search engine bot, but can you imagine how (for example) a title by itself is not very relevant to your overall site content, and how Google might penalize you for that? Consider the title of this post — on its own, it wouldn’t seem very relevant to the ongoing conversation on this site about Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, etc. If Google can’t figure out what your site is about, your pages will suffer in ranking.
Some designers try to get around this by adding NOFRAMES tags to the master page, but this only partially solves the problem because many search engines do not support the use of metatags in this manner. What the NOFRAMES tag does is describe the website to a search engine. What results is the search engine returns the NOFRAMES result, NOT the content the user is searching for. If you have ever searched for something on Google and been directed to a completely irrelevant page, you know how frustrating this is!
Most browsers don’t even support frames, so your client will get a message like “Sorry! You need a frames-supported browser to view this site.” That would be like your customer calling your business and getting a message, “Sorry. Your telephone is not compatible with our system. Please call back later.”
If you have a frame-based website, you are using a rotary dial phone in a digital phone era. You really owe it to your business to check if the very technology supporting your site prevents it from communicating with the outside world. If it’s a few years old, there’s a good chance that’s the case, as frames were the rage in web design for a period of time.
The sooner you convert your site to CSS, the sooner it will start climbing in the search engines, and actually do its job of representing your business to your prospects.
