Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Helping Search Engines

Search engines all work differently but pretty much uniformly do not understand frames or any content within a frameset or frame element. This means search engines will not find any links that require burrowing through a site for indexing purposes, and all the content of your framed site will be missed.

The same measures for improving accessibility for users with non-visual browsing devices (i.e., providing frame titles and complete noframes content) will also make it easier for search engines to index your content.

In addition, you may include a meta element with information about your site in the frameset document. Although not all search engines use meta information, meta elements can be useful tools for those that do. If your top-level frameset document contains limited noframes content, you can use the meta element to add a site description and keywords to the page for the search engine to index. Values for the meta element related to search engines are provided in Chapter 9.

For more information about search engines and how they work, see the Search Engine Watch site at http://www.searchenginewatch.com (from which the previous information was gathered).

Tip

For information on how MSN TV handles frames, see http://developer.msntv.com/Develop/Frames.asp.