Search Engines And Frames

Using frames in the development of a website has long been considered a hindrance to effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). While they offer a genuine method of design, spiders and search engine bots can struggle to index the content that is bound within the frame on a page making their use less than desirable if you want to take full advantage of organic search engine traffic.

Search engines use spiders and bots (essentially pieces of indexing software) in order to first find your website and then to determine the keywords it uses and rank a page for specific search results. Any design technique that prevents the spiders from being able to fully crawl a web page is therefore less than desirable from a search engine optimisation point of view.

While the major search engines constantly improve the indexing techniques they use, there are still some problems reported when trying to access frame content. If you already have a website design that utilises frames then there are certain techniques that can avoid the need to rebuild or redevelop a website and ensure that search engine optimisation is still a viable marketing technique.

Accessibility is a major issue in web development. Not only should you ensure that spiders and bots can access all of the content on a page, but it's important to remember that not all browsers and therefore not all visitors will be able to view content that is bound within a frame. While workarounds do exist they are not the ideal solution for search engine optimisation.