Whatever you do, do not use framesets when designing a web site! In essence you are reducing the number of linkable pages to one. We use a music shopping site as an example, and take a look at iTunes while we are at it.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. With a frameset you can put up more than one web page in the same browser window at the same time.

You can, for instance, put your navigation in a frame on the left hand side of the screen, and let the rest be filled with content. Clicking on a link in the navigation part of the window will open the corresponding page in the content part. And the navigation will always be there, regardless how much the reader scrolls in the content frame.

So what is the problem, search engine optimization wise?

The search engines will find the framed pages

Well, it used to be that the search engines would index the frameset HTML file only (i.e. the file that decides how the web browser window is to be divided and what files to include in the different frames), and not the pages that were to be included in the different frames.

Hence webmasters used a NOFRAMES tag in the frameset document to tell the search engines what the file was about. This is no longer a major problem as most search engines are able to identify and find the files linked to in the frameset document.

You cannot link to individual pages

No, the problem is that a site of this kind have only one — I repeat 1 — URL that can be bookmarked, and that is the web address of the frameset file itself.

So if you have online CD store with individual pages for each artist and for each album, it is impossible for surfers to bookmark those pages in their browser, and what’s even more important: It is impossible for outsiders to link to those pages.

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