Search Engine Optimization Mistakes of the Frames Era

Most sites that struggle to get found in search engines this year aren’t victims of some hidden trick they missed. They’re making a handful of avoidable mistakes, several of which are being actively punished by engines that have gotten wise to them. Here’s what shows up most often, and what to do instead.

Stuffing keywords into the meta tags and hoping no one notices. It’s tempting to list the same phrase fifty times in a meta keywords tag, figuring more repetition means more relevance. Several engines, including Infoseek, have started penalizing or outright ignoring pages that do this. The fix is simple: write a meta keywords tag the way you’d write a short, honest label for the page, five to ten real terms, no repetition tricks.

Hiding text with white-on-white or tiny fonts. Some sites pack a paragraph of keywords into the bottom of a page in a font color that matches the background, invisible to visitors but readable to a crawler. This is one of the fastest ways to get a site banned outright from an index once it’s caught, and engines are actively looking for it. If a word isn’t meant to be read by a person, it shouldn’t be on the page.

Building the whole site in frames. Frames were a popular way to keep navigation fixed while content changed, but most crawlers in 1999 index the frameset page, the outer shell with no real content, instead of the pages inside it. The result is a homepage that ranks for nothing because the crawler never sees your actual text. If you’re set on frames for design reasons, at minimum put real content and links inside a <noframes> block.

Submitting the same page over and over. Resubmitting a URL daily to “boost” its position is a common instinct and a wasted one. Most engines either ignore duplicate submissions within a short window or, worse, flag the pattern as spam. Submit once per engine, note the date and give it several weeks before checking again.

Chasing every engine equally instead of your customers’ engine. Not every business needs to be everywhere at once. A regional service business gets more from a solid Yahoo directory listing and local link exchanges than from obscure engine submissions few of its customers use. Spend the first round of effort on the two or three engines and directories your actual customers are likely to use.

Treating meta tags as the whole job. Meta tags help, but the page’s visible title, headings and body copy carry real weight too. A page with a perfect meta description and thin, generic body text still won’t hold up. Write the page for a person first, then make sure the tags reflect what’s there.

Ignoring the Yahoo and Open Directory Project listings. Because Yahoo is still largely a human-reviewed directory rather than a crawler-driven index, getting listed there takes a written submission and patience, not a metatag trick. Skipping that step because it’s manual is a mistake; a Yahoo listing sends real traffic and lends credibility that shows up elsewhere too.

None of these fixes require special tools or a big budget. They mostly require resisting the urge to game a system that is actively watching for exactly these shortcuts, and putting that effort into a site that reads well and is easy for both a person and a crawler to navigate.