How do I get a framed webpage to index to search engines?

Question

I've created a website for a friend's business. I have it set up in a 3 frame format. I've submitted it to the major search engines but they are not indexing the site. I'm told that because of the frames, the crawlers can't or won't index it. How can I fix this without busting the framework?

Answer 1

(1) Frames aren't too cool with alot of browsers...and you should restructure using divs, and it is relatively easy to do, but...
(2) Frames doesn't have much to do at all with crawlers...set up meta description, meta keywords, page title, keyword first use, keyword bolding, keyword positioning, and other things, will help vastly for crawler optimization. If you're really and truly interested in crawler optimization, there's a VERY good formula for Google optimization, written by Brett Tabke, on pages 374-375 of the book Google Hacks (the book itself is by Tara Calashain et. al. and it's from OReilly)

Answer 2

One way to do this is to create a seperate part of the website that is unframed, like a non flash site you create an index page that does not contain frames. and then make a primary site that asks whether a user wants to use the frames version or the non-frames version, infact I'm sure you may see your traffic increase on this as many people don't like frames to begin with.