What Is The Goal?

In considering look of your site, you first need to determine what elements are needed to promote your service or product. There are endless books, forums and people with adamant opinions on subject. Some opine a site should be all about linking, while others opine creating a community through message boards is key. A third set righteously point out a site should be slick or cool, while a fourth group will argue just opposite. So, who is right and who is wrong? The answer is…all of them.

When developing a site, goal is actually very simple. Your site should be useful. That’s it, big secret. The problem, of course, is “useful” means different things for different sites.

A site that provides a service to businesses, such as consulting, should focus on content and linking. A site that promotes something related to entertainment should have an element of cool and have message boards to discuss rumors, etc. A site that sells products should focus on linking and loading quickly, i.e., a simple, clean design. The point is that each site is unique and there is no universal answer. Whatever particular direction of your site, simply make sure it is useful to your users.

Site Examples

Some people say that framed sites, if done properly, have no problems in getting good rankings in search engines.

Others claim that if search engine optimization is important to you, never use frames.

In my opinion, truth lies somewhere in between. Yes, use of frames does throw up a few issues when it comes to getting good rankings in search engines which don't understand frames.

Hence, when you are designing a new site, I would recommend that you avoid using frames, unless you have a specific reason for doing so.

However, if you already have a site which uses frames, all is not lost. You can still get good rankings in search engines even though you have used frames.

Furthermore, using frames also has its own advantages when it comes to search engine placement, as we shall later on.

This article assumes that you have a working knowledge of frames. For more information on frames, go to http://www.webreference.com/dev/frames/

In case your site uses frames, key to getting good rankings lies in using NOFRAMES tag. The NOFRAMES tag is intended to help framed web sites display some content for those people who are using browsers which don't understand frames.

The search engines which don't understand frames also look at NOFRAMES tag. Hence, if you are using frames, you need to add content to NOFRAMES tag.

What you should do is to add a complete web page within NOFRAMES tag. Ensure that this page repeats important keywords for your site a number of times.