Internal Linking Structure Elements Strategy - Framed Navigation
(Page 7 of 8 )
There are many sites on the Web that are built with frames. Frames tend not to be search engine friendly for many reasons. One of the most obvious reasons is that it gives search engine spiders a challenge determining which file is the primary site content. Think of a framed site as a site that has many sites within it. So one might build a site in frames to leave the side bar navigation in a static position on the left, while giving the Web user the ability to scroll up and down on the right for the page with the content. Normally, when one clicks on a hyperlink within the left side frame box it will generate an action to replace the contents of the frame to its right. However, search engines do not know to look in that right frame and it stays within the navigation frame missing out on all your content. As you can see, the more frames utilized within a site the less search engine friendly the site is.
There is an acceptable standard available that can achieve the look of frames while making your site much more search engine friendly. This standard has been released by the World Wide Web Consortium (also known as the W3) and is known as CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. I will not be getting into the specifics of CSS in this article. If you would like more information on CSS, feel free to search the Web or contact my company for help at
http://www.rustybrick.com/.
If you insist on using frames, there are some guidelines you should follow to help increase the search engine spiders' ability to index your pages.
- Make sure that you include links from frameset to your internal pages
- Try to submit each internal page to search engines
- Try to obtain links from external sites to your internal pages
- Include text links at the bottom of each page
- Include breadcrumb trail at the top of the page
- Include text links within body text
- Build a site map that links to each internal page
- Utilize the noframe tag
Next: Conclusion >>
More Search Optimization Articles
More By Barry Schwartz
