Primary marketThe Pros And Cons Of Using Frames
Many real estate web designers use "frames" to minimize
regular site maintenance chores like updating a link, adding
a holiday theme or changing vital contact information.
Frames allow the webmaster to make changes once and...
voila! The change is reflected across your entire site.
The other major benefit to using frames is the ability to
provide visitors with access to other content while
preventing them from leaving your web site. This is
particularly useful when providing access to a national MLS
like realtor.com or homeseekers.com where, if you don"t keep
visitors on your site with your contact information in front
of them, chances are the listing agent will secure the lead.
Yet, despite the benefits, there is a serious downside to
using frames. In many cases, frames block the search engines
from spidering your site and indexing all the pages on your
site.
In the past month, we have reviewed over 100 real estate web
sites. We checked four things:
Frames or No-Frames
Existence of Proper Meta-Tags
Number of Pages
Search engine positioning results
Of the sites we studied,
almost all the framed sites had only one page of their site
indexed on the search engines. Non-framed sites normally had
numerous pages ranked on the search engines.
If your site is currently designed around frames, there are
three ways to fix this problem:
Dump the frames. This is your best option as it allows
the spidering engines to do their thing and use your entire site
for your promotion efforts. If you are concerned about
keeping visitors on your site, simply frame in one page and dump the frames on the rest of your site.
Create an index page that links to every page of your web
site and add a text link to both the top and left frame that
points to this page. This strategy effectively opens the
door and gives the engines something to spider.
Simply submit every page of your web site to the major
search engines, not just your index page. This strategy will
get some of your other pages working for you on some
engines, but not all of them. Some engines (spiders) will
only index pages they can find on their own.