Many real estate web designers use "frames" to minimize regular site maintenance chores like updating a link, adding a holiday theme or changing vital contact information. Frames allow the webmaster to make changes once and... voila! The change is reflected across your entire site.

The other major benefit to using frames is the ability to provide visitors with access to other content while preventing them from leaving your web site. This is particularly useful when providing access to a national MLS like realtor.com or homeseekers.com where, if you don't keep visitors on your site with your contact information in front of them, chances are the listing agent will secure the lead.

Yet, despite the benefits, there is a serious downside to using frames. In many cases, frames block the search engines from spidering your site and indexing all the pages on your site.

In the past month, we have reviewed over 100 real estate web sites. We checked four things:

1. Frames or No-Frames
2. Existence of Proper Meta-Tags
3. Number of Pages
4. Search engine positioning results

Of the sites we studied, almost all the framed sites had only one page of their site indexed on the search engines. Non-framed sites normally had numerous pages ranked on the search engines.

If your site is currently designed around frames, there are three ways to fix this problem:

1. Dump the frames. This is your best option as it allows the spidering engines to do their thing and use your entire site for your promotion efforts. If you are concerned about keeping visitors on your site, simply frame in one page and dump the frames on the rest of your site.

2. Create an index page that links to every page of your web site and add a text link to both the top and left frame that points to this page. This strategy effectively opens the door and gives the engines something to spider.

3. Simply submit every page of your web site to the major search engines, not just your index page. This strategy will get some of your other pages working for you on some engines, but not all of them. Some engines (spiders) will only index pages they can find on their own.

Published: August 1, 2001

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