Jane May Blogs

Dealing with Frames

Frames were popular a few years ago but they’re definitely not in anymore. A framed site is one in which the browser window is broken into two or more frames, each of which holds a Web page. It’s very un-Web 2.0ish.

Frames cause a number of problems. Some browsers don’t handle them well — in fact, the first frame-enabled browsers weren’t that enabled and often crashed when loading frames. In addition, many designers created framed sites without properly testing them. They built the sites on large, high-resolution screens, so they didn’t realize that they were creating sites that would be almost unusable on small, low-resolution screens.

From a search engine perspective, frames create the following problems:

• Some search engines have trouble getting through the frame-definition to your actual web page.
• If the search engine gets through, it indexes individual pages, not framesets. Each page is indexed separately, so pages that make sense only as part of the frameset end up in the search engines as independent pages.
• You can’t point to a particular page on your site. That is not good.

This may be a problem in the following situations:

Link campaigns: Other sites can link to only the front of your site; they can’t link to specific pages during link campaigns.

PPC campaigns: If you’re running a pay-per-click campaign, you can’t link directly to a page related to a particular product. I highly recommend you stay away from frames in PPC. I’ll give some examples soon about some PPC case studies I’m going to run.

Placing your products in shopping directories:  In this case, you need to be able to link to a particular product page. Frames don’t let you do that.

Search engines index URLs aka single pages: By definition, a framed site is a collection of URLs, and as such, search engines don’t know how to properly index the pages.

Overall there is no reason to still use framed pages. If you are still running sites you created a few years ago, I recommend you revamp them.

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Picking a domain name is one of the most important decisions you will face when first starting your web site. A good domain is important because it’s the first encounter people will have with your site. Even before visiting your web site, they will hear or see your domain name first. In addition to marketability, you want it to be something that search engines pick up. One of the major search engines whose radar you want to be on is Google.

Google actually reads URLs, looking for keywords in them. For instance, if you have a web site with the domain name sock-puppets.com and someone searches Google for sock puppets, Google sees sock-puppets.com as a match. Because a dash appears between the two words, Google recognizes the words in the domain name. (Google also interprets periods and slashes as word separators.) On the other hand, if you use an underscore or some other character, or if you run the words together (i.e. sock_puppets_party.com or Sock puppetparty.com), Google doesn’t see the words in the URL.

So putting keywords into the domain name and separating keywords with dashes can help you come up in search engine results. Another advantage to adding dashes between words is that it’s relatively easy to come up with a domain name that’s not already taken. Although it may seem like most of the good names were taken long ago, you can pretty easily come up with some kind of keyword phrase, separated with dashes, that is still available.

Search engines don’t care what first-level domain you use; you can have a .com, .net, .biz, .tv, or whatever; it doesn’t matter. However, looking at this from a marketing stand point, people normally associate a website URL with .com.  Especially those who are less familiar with the world wide web. 

With that said, the lift provided by keywords in domain names is very small, and you should take into consideration other, more important factors when choosing a domain name:

• A domain name should be short, easy to spell, and easy to remember. (KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid) And it should pass the “radio” test. Imagine you’re being interviewed on the radio and want to tell listeners your URL and make sure they are able to remember it and go to it once on their computers. You want something that you can say that is clear, understandable, without having to spell it. You don’t want to have to say “sock dash puppet dash party dot com.”
• In almost all cases, you should get the .com version of a domain name. If the .com version is taken, don’t try to use the .net or .org version for branding purposes! People remember .com, even if you say .org or .net or whatever, so if you’re planning to promote your Web site in print, on the radio, on TV, on billboards, and so on, you need the .com version.

Are keyworded domain names worth the trouble? Because the lift provided by keywords in the domain name is rather small — and, in fact, putting too many keywords into a name can work against you— it’s probably better to focus on a single, brandable domain name (a .com version).

Hopefully the first step of creating your website, blog, or forum will have these considerations as you want to generate as much traffic as possible and having your domain name on people’s minds.  Take Jane May Blogs for example.  There is no fancy meaning, no confusing underscores or misspelled words.  It’s clear, simple and tells the reader what the website is about.