Frames - A framed website - what does it mean? I keep hearing its bad for search engines and so I should avoid it, how do I do that?
Ok, we're not gonna go all technogeek here, I'm just gonna explain in the simplest terms possible what Frames are and why you should avoid using them.
First of all, when you start building your website, you'll normally start building it according to your own personal likes, dislikes, colour schemes, nice pics, proper wording, promo logos from Creative, EzFlow or whoever. Great, so far so good, then someone else will come along, maybe your mates, maybe other geeks letting you know that certain things dont look as good as you thought they did when viewed in another browser or at another screen resolution, so you change that to try and suit most tastes, most browsers and most screen resolutions. This is what you normally do, right? No?? This is what you should be doing!!
Everyone still tagging along? Good this is where it gets really interesting!!
When building your site, you also need to make sure that the search engines find your site attractive, ie, worthy of inclusion in their search results. Surprise surprise, the search engines dont give a damn what your site actually looks like, thats worth repeating, the physical appearance of your site is of ZERO importance to the search engines. They are only interested in one thing, your content....primarily your text. If they CANNOT find that content, you can kiss goodbye to the search results cos your site will never be in them, plain and simple.
So....when building our site, with what we've discussed above, we need to design and build for two types of visitor, the human kind and the search engine kind. Keep that in mind from here on in, we are designing our site for two types of visitor, human and robot. The human kind sees our site obviously as we ourselves see it, pretty colours, text, nail galleries, fancy designs, etc etc. The robot sees text content, no colours, no pictures, no fancy designs, just your text.
So far so good, we're starting to realize that we need to think bilaterally (on two fronts) when building our site, and so long as we do that, we'll be fine.
HOWEVER.... if we employ the use of Frames in our site, we'll preserve the physical appearance of our site but DENY the content of our site for the search engines. The site will look EXACTLY the same to us humans but the search engines wont find anything of note, rest assured they'll leave your site and most likely will never return. Is that what you want? Of course not. Why then would anyone use Frames? The simple answer is there is no good reason to use them, but some people use them by accident when building sites with website builder software, Frontpage, etc, simply because they dont know what they're at, thats forgiveable, but no less damaging for your new website. The main reason though that Frames are used on websites is because someone has built a site with a free provider (say Freewebs) and then some other provider has offered them a Free (or very cheap) domain name to use with their free site. So instead of of www.freewebs.angelasnails.com they now have Angela's Modern Nail Studio .
The site looks exactly the same and the web address looks like a professional one all for free???? Its almost too good to be true? Well actually, it is too good to be true, more often than not, your site now resides in a Frame....forever excluded from the search engines. DISASTER!!!!
I guess by now you know that Frames are mega bad, yeah? Anyone want to see what a framed site looks like? I've got a super site (a site I love) that has been framed and it pains me that it will never reach the audience it deserves to reach because of those Frames.
Ok, we're not gonna go all technogeek here, I'm just gonna explain in the simplest terms possible what Frames are and why you should avoid using them.
First of all, when you start building your website, you'll normally start building it according to your own personal likes, dislikes, colour schemes, nice pics, proper wording, promo logos from Creative, EzFlow or whoever. Great, so far so good, then someone else will come along, maybe your mates, maybe other geeks letting you know that certain things dont look as good as you thought they did when viewed in another browser or at another screen resolution, so you change that to try and suit most tastes, most browsers and most screen resolutions. This is what you normally do, right? No?? This is what you should be doing!!
Everyone still tagging along? Good this is where it gets really interesting!!
When building your site, you also need to make sure that the search engines find your site attractive, ie, worthy of inclusion in their search results. Surprise surprise, the search engines dont give a damn what your site actually looks like, thats worth repeating, the physical appearance of your site is of ZERO importance to the search engines. They are only interested in one thing, your content....primarily your text. If they CANNOT find that content, you can kiss goodbye to the search results cos your site will never be in them, plain and simple.
So....when building our site, with what we've discussed above, we need to design and build for two types of visitor, the human kind and the search engine kind. Keep that in mind from here on in, we are designing our site for two types of visitor, human and robot. The human kind sees our site obviously as we ourselves see it, pretty colours, text, nail galleries, fancy designs, etc etc. The robot sees text content, no colours, no pictures, no fancy designs, just your text.
So far so good, we're starting to realize that we need to think bilaterally (on two fronts) when building our site, and so long as we do that, we'll be fine.
HOWEVER.... if we employ the use of Frames in our site, we'll preserve the physical appearance of our site but DENY the content of our site for the search engines. The site will look EXACTLY the same to us humans but the search engines wont find anything of note, rest assured they'll leave your site and most likely will never return. Is that what you want? Of course not. Why then would anyone use Frames? The simple answer is there is no good reason to use them, but some people use them by accident when building sites with website builder software, Frontpage, etc, simply because they dont know what they're at, thats forgiveable, but no less damaging for your new website. The main reason though that Frames are used on websites is because someone has built a site with a free provider (say Freewebs) and then some other provider has offered them a Free (or very cheap) domain name to use with their free site. So instead of of www.freewebs.angelasnails.com they now have Angela's Modern Nail Studio .
The site looks exactly the same and the web address looks like a professional one all for free???? Its almost too good to be true? Well actually, it is too good to be true, more often than not, your site now resides in a Frame....forever excluded from the search engines. DISASTER!!!!
I guess by now you know that Frames are mega bad, yeah? Anyone want to see what a framed site looks like? I've got a super site (a site I love) that has been framed and it pains me that it will never reach the audience it deserves to reach because of those Frames.
And now that you mention it, it makes perfect sense...because the search engine will never be able to see past the 'frame' to the true 'meat' of the site!
