Whatever you do, do not use framesets when designing a web site! In essence you are reducing the number of linkable pages to one. We use a music shopping site as an example, and take a look at iTunes while we are at it.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. With a frameset you can put up more than one web page in the same browser window at the same time.

You can, for instance, put your navigation in a frame on the left hand side of the screen, and let the rest be filled with content. Clicking on a link in the navigation part of the window will open the corresponding page in the content part. And the navigation will always be there, regardless how much the reader scrolls in the content frame.

So what is the problem, search engine optimization wise?

The search engines will find the framed pages

Well, it used to be that the search engines would index the frameset HTML file only (i.e. the file that decides how the web browser window is to be divided and what files to include in the different frames), and not the pages that were to be included in the different frames.

Hence webmasters used a NOFRAMES tag in the frameset document to tell the search engines what the file was about. This is no longer a major problem as most search engines are able to identify and find the files linked to in the frameset document.

You cannot link to individual pages

No, the problem is that a site of this kind have only one — I repeat 1 — URL that can be bookmarked, and that is the web address of the frameset file itself.

So if you have online CD store with individual pages for each artist and for each album, it is impossible for surfers to bookmark those pages in their browser, and what’s even more important: It is impossible for outsiders to link to those pages.

We experienced this recently when designing a small mini-site for a friend of us, Norwegian prog rocker Thore Engen. Non-mainstream bands like his have found new life on the Web, as it is now possible to reach fans all over the world.

We wanted to link to online stores selling his albums, with separate links for each album, as we know that the chances of visitors buying is reduced every time they have to click on another link.

Well, it turned out that the major online record store in this niche; Record Heaven, has a framed based store, which means that we can link to he store home page only. At the moment that page has no information on Thore’s band. Visitors clicking on our link will therefore have to use the store’s search engine to find the album.

We tried to link to the band web-page only (you can find the URL by right-clicking on the frame, and open the frame in a separate window). It turns out that for this store to work the whole frameset has to be present.

This means that if a search engine for some reason decides to link to the artist page, it will be “orphaned” and lack navigation. There is no way the visitor can make it work.

All link juice goes to one page

This is obviously a problem both for Thore and Record Heaven, as they both have an interest in selling as many albums as possible.

It is an even greater problem for the record store, however, as most links leading to the site will (and should) go to the home page. Given the importance search engines put on inbound links to identify the content of pages, this makes it harder to optimize separate pages for separate bands and artists.

Moreover, all visitors finding the site in the search engines while looking for a particular artist will have to navigate through the site in order to find it. If the site navigation scheme is suboptimal, this means that they will loose a lot of potential customers. In Record Heaven’s case this is a serious problem, as its regular site does not include direct links to the relevant pages in the store. No wonder, they are all framed!

Linking to iTunes

Another interesting challenge we had to face when designing this site, was iTunes. It turns out that the Apple iTunes store has two of Thore’s albums, and given the popularity of that site we wanted to give readers easy access to that store.

Note that Apple iTunes is a piece of separate software, not a web site, even if the underlying technology is HTML-based.

It is actually possible to link to the iTunes store (right-click/ctrl-click on any link in iTunes to get the URL). However, that links leads to an empty web page with a script that opens up iTunes. If the “clicker” does not have iTunes installed, he or she will get the opportunity to download the software.

This is not a problem for the artist linking to Apple, but it is a problem for Apple, as there will be a lot of links on the web linking to their redirect file. Again, each and every inbound link will have a text that is artist or album specific, giving Apple the opportunity to rank well for all these artists and albums.

The file we are linking to redirects the user to the iTunes store and does not contain any information on the artist or CD. It does contain generic information on iTunes and the iPod range for surfers that do not have iTunes installed, but as in the case of the frameset, this will not lead to a large number of “long tail” specialized pages. Too bad, because that is exactly what you should wish for when selling music online.

In this case it would actually make sense for Apple to develop separate Web pages for all artists and let links leading to the iTunes store end up on that open Web site. This would mean that the user would have to click one more time to download a song (to open/switch to the iTunes software and download the track), but that would definitely be worth it search engine marketing wise.

The moral

There are a lot of web designers out there that do not know much about search engine optimization. Ask a search engine marketing expert before you buy fancy shopping solutions of the kind described here, as they may weaken your sales in a serious way.

And do stay away from frames, would you?