splash screens, framesets, meta tags and search engines

[chesneil]

Hi. I've made a few homepages but never actually uploaded one, so I'd like some advice on my own site regarding the above stuff.

Here's the structure of my site:

I've got Dynamic Drive's all-on-one-page-DHTML splash (and I've put in some external js - a cookie - to stop this running more than once a day). When it's run its course, or if it's not the first visit that day, it opens a frameset page. If someone comes through to one of the internal pages from a search engine I've included some external javascript to send it up to the frames.

I've read up about meta tags and optimization for search engines and I know that the framset doesn't help...but that's how I've made it. My thinking is that I should put description and keyword tags in the main internal page (home.html) and submit that to the search engine (or do I have to submit index.html to them??). Visitors from the search engine will then automatically be redirected to the frameset by the js and see the site as intended. They obviously won't see the splash page, but that's no problem. Then, I could call the splash page index.html so people who access by my domain name rather than a search engine will go there.

I don't really want anyone to come via another page so I don't intend to put meta tags anywhere except the main page, whichever that might be.

By the way, I'm not up against a lot of competition here - the keywords that I think people will use brought up nothing on the local Yahoo! search engine. On the other hand, I DO want to be registered on the search engines. I'd be grateful for any advice from someone with knowledge of this apparently hit-and-miss topic.

Many thanks.
chesneil

[joh6nn]

i'm no expert, but your strategy seems prety good to me.

as far as submitting your site to search engines, the links for doing that are usually pretty prominent on their different pages.

[chesneil]

Thanks for replying joh6nn. Have to think about this.

[popgun]

Here's something I did a long time ago on how to to place framed sites effectively in search engine listings. Hope it helps

http://www.technorealm.co.uk/design/search-engines-frames.html

:cool:

[chesneil]

Thanks a lot popgun. By far the clearest explanantion I've read on this topic. I have one question: I know good advice is to put meta tags on every page, but I'm not sure why. Surely the search engines will find the index.html page first and just follow the links from that, so log all the pages on the site anyway?? Or maybe not?

[MCookie]

If you mean the robots meta tags, you're right. You don't need them, unless you want them to not index you pages.

[chesneil]

I meant the keywords and description tags.

[MCookie]

Ah! Well, although some engines like Google don't even read keywords anymore, I still would put them in. Take the most important keywords from your contents and put them in your title tag, meta keywords tag, description tag and pageheaders.
About optimizing your site for searchengines: http://spider-food.net/

[popgun]

Unless you specifically DON'T want a page indexed, always use meta 'description' and 'keywords' tags. Even on pages where there's only minimum content.

That way, even getting someone to a low content page then gives them the option to browse the rest of your site, click your ads, bookmark for later, tell their friends etc. Any exposure helps.

While the keywords tag might be ignored by some engines (not all), the description tag is used by others in the search listings, so make it interesting.

[chesneil]

Thanks a lot guys. Appreciate your help.

[Feyd]

Originally posted by popgun
Unless you specifically DON'T want a page indexed, always use meta 'description' and 'keywords' tags.

Huh? Not using keywords and description has nothing to do with whether or not your site gets indexed, period. If you don't want a page listed, by omitting those two items your page will still be indexed if the spider is traversing (technically, your page can still be indexed, though it may not be depending on level depth, queue and other spider-specific instructions). The only way you can reliably not have a page indexed is to use the ROBOTS.TXT standard (the meta robots tag is all but useless--always has been, actually--it is really only good for controlling caching of your pages and images by certain bots, most other spiders don't even listen to it).

A splash page is going to destroy your ratings, period. The spider will (more often than naught) not even see the redirect link to your subsequent pages from your splash. Sure, you can add your proper metas in that page, but unless you provide a valid href somewhere else in the page, you're killing yourself. You need to have some links going off to your main content pages other than that splash redirect. (basically saying : Keep your skip intro link on the splash, and make sure it points to main page content)

You also need to place your meta tags in your frameset page(s) as well, since the spider will read a frameset page, but not necessarily index the framed pages. You are already using a good practice of forcing your content to be framed, but you are going to need to submit those pages individually (without the frames) or (and this is the better option): link to all of your content pages (no frames) from the NOFRAMES section of your frameset page(s). The spiders will see these links and traverse them, thereby indexing your content with your metas and when a user hits that page, your framereloader takes care of the rest.

And, as has been mentioned, you should use your metas on every page (barring Admin suites), despite the fact that spiders will typically (for best practice) only recurse 3 levels deep on your site (yoursite.com, yoursite.com/two, yoursite.com/two/three). The variety adds some chances to your rankings, but it also runs the risk of dilluting your keywords...keep them on topic and on target, don't dillute your potential rankins by using keywords that have nothing to do with the site...

[popgun]

Unless you specifically DON'T want a page indexed, always use meta 'description' and 'keywords' tags

By that, I meant If you're going to inhibit indexing for some pages using a ROBOTS.TXT file, there's simply no point in adding the description and keywords meta tags.

My bad grammar, perfectly pointed out by Feyd.


:p

[chesneil]

Thanks for your detailed explanation Feyd. Actually, I chucked the splash page and used popgun's noframes template (thank you) from his web page, including links to the other pagesThe variety adds some chances to your rankings, but it also runs the risk of dilluting your keywords...keep them on topic and on target, don't dillute your potential rankins by using keywords that have nothing to do with the site...I'm not sure what you mean by that. What dilutes what? Is it a bad idea to put the keyword tag from the main page on all the other pages (when the keywords won't match the content of the other pages)? If not - if the meta tags on each page are relevant to that page - how does it dilute rankings?

Furthermore, on the other pages there isn't much content. For example, a map and a short intro saying 'here's where we are'. I don't think anyone typing 'map' needs to find my site :). In other words, in my case, either the meta tags will not match THAT page but will match the main page and the site in general, or they'll be ineffective because no-one will use those search terms anyway :confused: Can you advise me on the best way please?

[redbeth]

OK, here's the deal, if you want to be visible to search engines, especially Google, your index page needs HTML text on the page.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Search Engines, plus a handy tool for submitting, can be found at www.selfpromotion.com (http://selfpromotion.com/?CF=webwitch). There's a lot of information there, but it's well worth reading if your just getting started. It isn't very pretty, just informative.

Also, linking to a site index in a text link on your home page gives spiders a short cut to every page in your site, so they can index those too. Another good resource is searchenginewatch.com (http://searchenginewatch.com), which has useful articles on trends and tips.

Good luck!