I'm an admin with TeraVox Networks we're in development right now and need a couple of good programers to help out. We have big plans and intend on becoming the next Yahoo. If your interested e-mail me or reply here .

P.S. (to the mods.) I'm going to post this in some of the programing forums to I'm just trying to find some good programers so please don't accuse me of spamming.

One site Ive optimised is terribly complex - popups, flash, no real text. Slapping a frameset at the front and optimising the noframes has worked wonders - its ranking well with a couple of doorways linked off the noframes that are doing ok but nowhere near as well as the main page. Essentially there was no way any spiders were going to get into this site and make sense of it.

But...other sites that arent so complex work so much better without frames. You can get yourself tied up in knots getting the spiders into the site itself - especially if the frameset becomes an integral part of the navigation. If you can't sum up what a framed site is about on the index page noframes then things get complicated - if a site is about a lot of things then much easier to keep it flat.

And then theres the useability issues that arent related to SE optimisation

Jacob Nielsen: Why Frames Suck
(Some of the issues raised in 1996 no longer hold true - version 2.x browsers, back button /print functionality see the 1999 update - but alot of what Jacob says is still very good advice.)

oh btw - you'll find plenty of experiences/advice in the dynamic pages /frames etc forum - use the search function or set the show posts from preferences back a while.

[This message has been edited by Ness (edited 02-07-2000).]

[This message has been edited by wasmith AKA crazylogic (edited 09-07-1999).]

[This message has been edited by JuniorHarris (edited 09-06-2001).]

Well, this is an oft-asked question, the answer to which is much debated within these humble forums.

From my own personal experiences, I would say that is you've constructed a range of doorway pages, and would like those indexed before everything else, then go ahead and submit those pages right away - by hand I might add (fill a "Submit Your Site" form for each page at each engine). I did this back in November/December, and I'm seeing some superb results already, over range of engines.

I would suggest you learn how to code a "robots.txt" file, as these can be quite useful for guiding robots through your site.

Prior to popular belief (and my own for quite some time), these do still work, although AltaVista seems to be misbehaving a little, and not following the guidelines within the "robots.txt" file that I've written.

Anyway, I digress. If you like to learn all about this interesting and useful little file, you can read all about it here. Once you've 'swatted up' on that (may I suggest you both bookmark and print that page), then use the spider list feature at SimpleEnigma's superb site SpiderHunter to make a list of all known spiders/robots for each engine. Then compile the names (with individual instructions for each) into your very own "robots.txt" file, to create a sort of Do's & Don'ts roadmap for the engines.

Hope this helps...

[This message has been edited by SearchEngineer (edited 03-12-2001).]

Basically, while you have a nice, tastefully designed website, it is not at all optimized for search engine ranking. You need to become familiar with crafting your meta tags and content to achieve recognition under the various spiders and algorythms utilized by the search engines.

At a very minimum, you need to develop a meta tag description that describes the content of your site. On your index page, you have only an image and no text. you should have a couple of well worded paragraphs, separate from the image, containing the keywords you believe your visitors will used in their searches.

You want the spiders, et. al. to see immediately what your site is all about. Then you should tailor your meta tag description and title to target those keywords. By way of example, a title in the meta tags which says "Welcome to Carmagen..." says nothing about the nature of the site. "Hydrocarbon Industry Engineering Specialists and Consultants" would tell what you do and what the site covers.

Lastly, you should familiarize yourself with the use of doorway pages (Doorway Pages Forum) to target each of your keywords.

This is merely a suggestion, but I think such an approach would be much more search engine friendly.

Videoace