How Do Search Engines See Your Site?

Here's a site for which I recently did an analysis. Just looking at the homepage screenshot, you'd think it has a good amount of keyword-rich content.

You'd be wrong.

The items circled in black are actually graphic images. That is, we see them as words, but the builder of the site made them into pictures, so the search engines can't read them.




The stuff circled in blue is in a frameset.

So here's how the homepage looks to the search engines:




Now, the search engines can follow the links in the source code and read the content elsewhere. However, this site ranks so poorly for everything except the few words visible on the page's code that it seems clear that frames continue to be a problem from the point of view of SEO.

Since they also hamper usability (printing out the page, consistent look across browsers, etc.), it's a good plan to avoid them.