Archive for December, 2007

Search Engine Optimisation for Frames Websites • 12.23.07

There have been many a time when I have come across websites being designed using “Frames” and I have had many questions from clients and workshop attendees this regarding. “Frames” were a great way of designing websites about 10 years ago when Search Engines could not read the “content” of the sites itself and only the Meta Tags. Since then, a lot of water has flown under the bridge…

Now that Search Engines can read the “content” of your site, “Frames” are one of the worst method to use in HTML as they do not show the content of the site to Search Engine spiders who feed on it in order to Index your site’s content.

There is not a massive amount of information on the web about “Frames “as not many people really care about them anymore but if you have a “Frames” website and that your day job does not involve being head down in Web optimisation this post is for you. This concise literature review should help you understand what “Frames” are, how to check if your business’ site is built with them, why they are everything but not best practice for Search Engine Optimisation and what to do about it.

What are Frames?

“Framing”, according to Wikipedia, is a method of displaying multiple HTML documents on one page. Each “Frame” displays a different HTML document. For instance, if your website is www.mywebsite.com the page you land on would be displaying more than one “HTML” page: one could be a navigation menu, and another one the content of your welcome page for instance. Now, if you display more than one page on a page, how will a Search Engine know what page you are talking about? (this will be discussed below)

As most web professionals would agree, “Frames” are an old-school HTML technique. Although they now are not as commonplace as they once were (around 2000), they are still out there. I often see them being used in Small and Medium Business’s “brochure” websites designed in the late 1990s, early 2000. I even designed a website in “Frames” myself in 2000!

How does Google index sites with Frames?

This is not from me but from Google Webmaster Help Centre on Frames directly

Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames can cause problems for search engines because they don’t correspond to the conceptual model of the web. In this model, one page displays only one URL. Pages that use frames display several URLs (one for each frame) within a single page. If Google determines that a user’s query matches the page as a whole, it will return the entire frame set. However, if the user’s query matches an individual frame within the larger frame set, Google returns only the relevant frame. In this case, the entire frame set of the page will not appear.

How do I know if my website has been designed in Frames?

  1. The easiest way is to look at the website url (www.mysite.com) - does your website URL change when you click on different categories? For instance, if you click on the “About us” or “Tariffs” button, the URL should become www.mysite.com/about-us.html or www.mystie.com/tariffs.html respectively (or something similar). If the URL remains www.mysite.com then there is a large chance your site has been built with “Frames”
  2. To verify this, go and view the Source Code. If you seem <frameset> tags it means your site is most probably in “Frames”
  3. You can also check the Document Type Definition in the Source Code. Any good webdesigner would have a document type at the top of all her HTML files. The DTD of a site designed in “Frames” should resembles this:
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

Now, if you have no DTD at the top of the Source Code, it does not mean that your website is not designed in “Frames”. It however could mean that you should source a new webdesigner. Believe me or not, I have seen websites designed by “webdesigners” without DTD!! According to HTML standards, each HTML document requires a document type declaration (DTD or DOCTYPE). The “DOCTYPE” begins the HTML document and tells a validator which version of HTML o use in checking the document’s syntax. An HTML validator is an online tool that checks your Web page or site to make sure all of the HTML code meets standard specifications.

Frames and Search Engine Optimisation

Using “Frames” is commonly seen by Search Engine Professional to be detrimental to your search engine ranking and is notoriously difficult to promote. Any good Web professional would know that and will therefore use better techniques. Let me explain the reason behind this:

The two most important factors in Search Engine Optimisation are:

  • Structured, quality, keyword-rich content visible to Search Engine spiders
  • Quality and relevant inbound links to corresponding pages on your website

Websites designed in “Frames”

  • Do not make the source code (HTML) of your pages content available to anyone to see (this includes the Search Engine Spiders) but only always the same source code content (generally the navigation bar which remains the same) even though your eye sees a different content (eg: the About Us page etc). All the hard work you have put in copy-writing will not be picked up by Search Engines simply because they cannot “see it”! Now, this is rather concerning when you think that the latest statistics reveal that 97% of online purchases started with a Search Engine.
  • Do not allow other websites to link to a specific page on your site - very concerning as well as inbound links (backlinks) to your site are one of the single most important aspect in getting better Search Engine rankings.

Now, I often hear my clients tell me the following about their Frames website:

… I have a “Frames” website and I can show you that it has been Indexed in Google. When I search for it on Google I find it in the first pages…

That is correct, the index.html page (the first page you land on when you access the website eg: www.mywebsite.com) has most probably been indexed but all the other pages most probably haven’t. You can check which pages of your websites have been indexed by Google using this command: site:www.mywebsite.com - you will soon see that if you click on every single one of them you will most probably never reach your content’s pages… Whatever your web developper tells you, your “Package” page offering all those great Unique Selling Point of your Bed and Breakfast is never going to be indexed in Google and will therefore never show when a potential client searches for it. Not only that page, but your whole site if that client does not use the keywords in your page title (read below).

Other business owners also tell me :

… but when we type our main keywords (often found in the page title - which is the same one throughout all the site by the way … first SEO mistake) our site does appear on Google - so what are you talking about Fabie?…

That is correct. The site ranks for these keywords. Let me tell you why. Imagine you own the “PLUM BEACH Bed & Breakfast” in Plum Beach

  • www.plumbeachbedandbreakfast.com.au
  • Website Title: Plum Beach Bed and Breakfast
  • Keywords typed in Google Search Box: Bed and Breakfast in Plum Beach

Now, can you see a pattern in the dot points above? I purposely called the town “Plum Beach” as it is not a very competitive name and what are the chanced of there being more than one “Plum Beach” towns on this planet? This is the case of small tourism areas in Australia as well.

Once can affirm that it is totally normal in a non-competitive environment that the rankings on Google are going to be relatively high for these key terms as long as your competitors haven’t yet realised they could be making much more money by maximising their online presence.

The high rankings in Google are most probably merely due to the fact that:

  • The keywords are in the URL
  • The keywords are in the Page Title tag

Now, if you are happy with your website being visible ONLY on your page title keywords, having a very low Google Page Rank, not being visible to all the rest of people searching for you on different terms and not getting inbound links to relevant pages because it is simply technically impossible with “Frames”, well that’s fine …

Once all your competitors have implemented an SEO strategy and are ranking higher than you on Google and that you drop off the Search Engine Results Page radar and lose 50% of your bookings to your competitors, well, that suddenly becomes a radically different story and you might want to re-think your web strategy…

SEO Workarounds for “Frames” websites
What do I do for my webpage to still get indexed with Frames? Unless a webpage which used frames contains relevant content in the <noframes> tag, it is unlikely to get indexed. What is even worse is if this page does get indexed and your web users find you through a search engine, they will usually be taken to one of the pages within the “Frame”. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (as navigation is normally contained in a separate “Frame”) and, therefore, there is unfortunately no way for the user to move to any other page on the site! Is that what you would really like when you have put a lot of effort in marketing your site?

As you would have guessed, there is not much literature on how to optimise framed sites as they are becoming extinct. Any knowledgeable webdesigner will tell you that “table-less CSS” is the way to go and that “Frames” have been history for a while now. With all the SEO issues associated to them it is now cheaper to get your site re-coded than to try and play around at getting your “Frames” to be SEO friendly!

However, what you can do is use the <noframes> tag. The <noframes> tags displays text for browsers that do not handle “Frames”. Putting your “content” pages text in the <noframes> tag (if used adequately) will also let search engine spiders know what your site is about! However, the <noframes> tag goes inside the <frameset> element. This is worth mentioning as I have seen more than one website where the <noframes> tag was outside the <frameset>, which is basically pointless!

How can I learn more?

Very good illustrated example of proper use of Frames by one of the web gurus: Danny Sullivan

Frames explained by the World Wide Web Consortium (international web standards body)

How to Optimise Frames Sites?

Tips for Frames websites

How to get a Framed website indexed by Search Engines?

Google Analytics for Frames Websites

I hope this review has been useful to you and your small and medium business and that you now have a better knowledge of “Frames”. I have been wanting to write this post for a while now as I have come across too many ill-informed consumers. Thanks for reading until the end and I welcome your comments and suggestions!

Posted in Web design and SEO tipswith 2 Comments →

Web and Search Engine Glossary • 12.16.07

Here is what I believe to be a beginner’s glossary to Search engine and Web terms.

I must have of course omitted a few key terms but if you post them in the comments section I will add them. Don’t forget you can use the “define:your term”function in Google!

  • Absolute Unique Visitors - The number of unique individuals who’ve come to your site in a given time period. So, if I come to your site 20 times in a week, I still only count as a single unique visitor. This statistic is important because it tells you your reach, or the total size of the audience coming to your site.
  • Algorithm - Step-by-step procedure for carrying out a mathematical computation or a transformation of data, usually used in reference to work performed by a computer.
  • CSS - A W3C recommended language for defining style (such as font, size, color, spacing, etc.) for web documents. Very search engine friendly.
  • Code – aka Markup - The background code that runs a web site. As well as HTML & XHTML, this can include, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, JSP, Coldfusion and more.
  • Dead link - An Internet link which does not lead to a page or site. This usually occurs when a server is down, the page has moved, or it no longer exists. You do not want dead links on your website – there are free tools to check if your site is pointing to dead links.
  • Directory - directories are built from submissions made by website owners, and generally arrange site listings hierarchically.
  • Domain - A sub-set of Internet addresses. Domains are hierarchical, and lower-level domains often refer to particular web sites within a top-level domain. The most significant part of the address comes at the end - typical top-level domains are .com, .com.au , .net, .edu, .gov, .org.
  • Dynamic html - web pages generated on demand by data in databases or using similar technology. Can create ranking problems because a search engine’s spider may not retrieve relevant content.
  • Frames - Some sites have pages that are made up of multiple HTML pages. Typically the navigation will be on one page and the content on another. You can tell if a website is built in Frames by looking at the source code and also if the website address is always the same for each page. Frames are an old technique and are NOT search engine friendly.
  • Google Adsense - Contextual advertising by Google. Website publishers earn a portion of the advertising revenue for placing Google sponsored links on their site.
  • Google Adwords - This is the Pay Per Click advertising program offered by Google.
  • Hidden text - Text that is visible to the search engine spiders but not to site visitors. Used to add extra keywords in the page without actually adding content to a site. Most search engines will penalise Web sites which use hidden text. Do NOT use this practice!
  • Home page - The main page of a Web site. Generally called index.html
  • HTML (HyperText Markup Language) - The coding language that all Web sites use to exist on the Internet. Check www.w3c.org
  • Hyperlinks - Hyperlinks are used to link one or more documents together.
  • Impression - A single display of an online advertisement.
  • Inbound link – aka backlinks - Links that direct users to another Web site. When a user arrives at a site from another site, that link is known as an inbound link. You need a reasonable amount of great quality inbound links to increase your search engine rankings.
  • Invisible text - using a font color the same or close to the color of the background of a page, in an attempt to allow the content to be indexed by search engines while not being visible to humans. To search engines, this is spam.
  • Keyword density - Keyword density is the ratio of a keyword or key phrases to the total number of words on that page.
  • Keyword frequency - Keyword frequency is the number of times keywords occur in the text on a given page. Search engines want to see more than one repetition of a keyword in your text to make sure it’s not an isolated case.
  • Keyword meta tag - Due to abuse by many Web sites in the past, search engines have reduced the importance of the keywords meta tag when ranking a Web page for keyword relevance. Many have actually decided to not consider the keywords tag altogether. While it has reduced in significance, it is still a relatively important meta tag to include in your Web pages.
  • Keyword phrase - A phrase used to find pages when conducting a search.
  • Keyword research / keyword analysis - Researching the most relative and popular keywords for a given site.
  • Keyword Spamming - Deliberate repetition of keywords in a page by using invisible or tiny text to increase keyword density. This is banned by search engines.
  • Keyword - A word used to find pages when conducting a search.
  • Link analysis: a measure of the quality and relevance of the set of links pointing to a given site; contrast with link popularity.
  • Link baiting - To create something that naturally attract backlinks for your web page by getting people to talk about it, discussing it on forums, blogging about it, posting it on social bookmarking sites and linking to it from their sites.
  • Link Farms - sites created and maintained solely for the purpose of constructing links between member sites. Should be avoided as a violation of most search engines’ policies; their use won’t build your site’s link popularity, and may result in a ranking penalty.
  • Link popularity - Search engines often use link popularity as part of their ranking criterion. In simple terms, link popularity is the measurement of the number of other Web sites that include a link to your Web site on theirs. Each search engine, depending on their specific algorithms, determines it differently.
  • META tag - html tag in the header section of a web page, intended to offer content to search engines. Among them are the keyword and description tags, but these days most true search engines de-emphasize or completely ignore META tags.
  • Mirror sites - Sites designed as duplicates of an original site, but are hosted on a different server. Link cloaking and doorway pages, the creation of mirror sites is a recognized spam tactic and violators will be penalised by many of the major search engines.
  • ODP - Open Directory Project: The largest human edited directory on the Internet. The Open Directory provides listings for free but only for qualified sites and because editors are volunteers, wait times can be lengthy.
  • Outbound link - A link to a site outside of your own.
  • Page Rank - A numerical rating of a site developed by Google as part of it’s algorithms for determining search engine listings.
  • Page Views - tells you how many pages of your site are viewed in a given period. If I come to your site 20 times in a week, viewing 3 pages each time, I count as 60 page views. Page views are an indication of just how interested people are in your site. A high ratio of page views to visits likely means an interested audience.
  • PPC - Pay Per Click. This is an advertising option in which the advertiser has typically a small textual ad on a search engine site and pays only if a user clicks on the link in the ad.
  • Reciprocal link - An exchange of links between two sites. Not a good technique for SEO
  • Relevancy - how closely related a particular page is to the search term requested.
  • Search engine - A search engine is a database system designed to index and categorise internet addresses, otherwise known as URLs (for example, http://www.untanglemyweb.com).
  • Search engine marketing (SEM) - encompasses several forms of marketing products and services on the Internet through management of information presented by search engines and directories. Example: Pay Per Click.
  • Search engine optimisation (SEO) - These are the techniques used to improve a Web page’s results in a search. You do not need to pay the search engines for this.
  • Search engine positioning - the process of managing a page or site’s positioning in the search engines.
  • SERP - A “search engine results page,” the page of site listings that a search engine returns in response to a user’s entry of a search query.
    Spam: as it applies to search engines, any attempt to submit or place deceptive information, or to “trick” the search engine into placing a page in an inaccurate position.
  • Spider – aka crawlers or robots - A software program used by search engines to crawl the Web, storing URLs and indexing the keywords and text of pages. Spiders are also referred to as crawlers or robots.
  • Traffic - The actual visitors to a Web page or Web site.
  • URL - The Uniform Resource Locator is used to specify the address of Web sites and Web pages.
  • Visits - The number of times people open your site in their browser. If I come to your site 20 times in a week, I count as 20 visits. This is important, too - a high ratio of visits to visitors means you’ve got a loyal audience.
  • Word stemming - a practice used to some search engines in which searches will return results for words based upon a particular stem. For example, a search for “develop” might return pages containing the words “development” or “developer.”

    • Posted in E-tourismwith No Comments →

    Tips from the T-List (Travel & Tourism Marketing Book) • 12.13.07

    How wonderful is technology, especially when it can get “translated” into a real, A5 size hard-cover book that I can take on the train and which will not run out of battery?

    Jens Thraenhart, Stephen Joyce and many more Travel & Tourism bloggers have participated in the first ever ISBN-identified collection of world-wide tourism and travel marketing best practices, the “Tips from the T-List” book.

    Tips From The T-List Hardcopy

    As an travel industry blogger, I have had the chance to submit one of my post - “Tourism Website Optimisiation” which has been selected and published in the 148 pages book. Trust me, this is a fantastic feeling and sense of achievement - especially when I came to the realisation that I was one of the only two Aussies selected! I have been working and collaborating with the international online tourism scene for over a decade now but when it all comes together and lands in your mailbox (no, not Outlook or Mail but the real one, outside your house!) and the virtual online world comes to you in black and white, printed on real paper, it is a totally different feeling.

    Well, to tell you the truth, it was a feeling of “wetness” to start with - as - believe me - Australian mailboxes have not been designed for rainy situations! What can I say, my very own copy of the book has got some character now!

    Even though my book is a hard copy, you can download a pdf version for free on www.tipsfromthetlist.com - I urge all the small and medium tourism operators to get their mouse on a copy as it is a wealth of unique tips from the gurus of the online world! You can also join our group on Facebook.

    Happy reading from yours truly “published author”… :-)

    Posted in E-tourismwith No Comments →

    Online Marketing Workshop for Tourism Operators • 12.11.07

    A fantastic part of my job is being able to spread my passion for search engine marketing and optimisation. Don’t you just love it when you can make a positive difference in someone’s life or business and give people just that little bit of extra something to help them make that extra step forward?

    I conducted a 0ne-day workshop in Beaudesert, QLD yesterday for about 30 tourism operators from the Scenic Rim Region (Beaudesert, Boonah and Ipswich). The Scenic Rim is located about 1.5 hours from Brisbane and the Gold Coast and has got some amazing stuff to see. If the cities are not for you and you have already seen more beaches than you can remember, get in the car and head inland. There is wine tours, luxury bed and breakfast accommodation, water skiing, hot air ballooning and you can even treat your love handles to some delicious fudge.

    The 9 to 3 workshop was one full-on day with a fair bit of information overload but I believe it went very well as there was a lot of notes-taking, questions and ah-ha moments happening! You can download Introduction Scenic Rim, the PPC and Analytics and the Keyword and Link Building. I have uploaded the presentation with the Notes pages - so make sure you print all the notes as well! Each powerpoint is about 1 MB in size.

    During the presentation I also mentioned:

    www.whirlpool.net.au - a wealth of information on Internet connection and any other IT related query in Australia.

    small business ideas forum

    Firefox is the browser I was using yesterday. Well worth dowloading - and its free of course!

    Untanglemyweb.com is my company - the website has a lot of info on SEO, SEM and PPC for tourism and all my contact details. Don’t hesitate to drop me a line if you would like me to assess your online strategy!

    I might have mentioned a few other forums but cannot remember right now! Make sure you post a comment and I will update the post!

    If you enjoyed the workshop yesterday, if you hated it or if you have recommendations, please let me know via the comments so I can improve it for the next operators.

    I look forward to checking out your sites in a few weeks to see how you have implemented what you learnt yesterday! I am sure there will be a few Google analytics scripts in your HTML!

    All the best and Merry Xmas!

    fabie

    Posted in E-tourismwith 5 Comments →

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      Chief Executive Optimiser @ Untanglemyweb.com and Outdoors Sports Junkie

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