SEO training can be overwhelming. There are literally hundreds of factors that go into search engine ranking on today's major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. When designing a web site or a web page for high search engine ranking,avoid making this one mistake that alone could prevent you from achieving a top ten ranking on your target keywords. What is this one costly mistake? Read on to find out.

Build your site on a good foundation

Your web site structure is the foundation to high search engine ranking. If you build your website with the wrong structure, anything else you do to promote your web site will be crippled from the start. The most costly mistake you could do to cripple your SEO efforts is to build your web site using frames.

Using Frames makes your job so much harder

Using frames on your site makes it much more difficult to achieve high search engine ranking. Does it make it impossible? No, but it does make it much more difficult. With all the competition already our there for achieving high search engine rankings on competitive keywords, why would you want to make your work harder than it has to be?

How do frames prevent high rankings?

If you go to any web site that has frames, right click anywhere on the page, and choose 'view source', you'll notice that the HTML that comes up has nothing to do with the text on the page. The main frameset usually calls the other frames for content and doesn't contain much relevant content on its own. At best, this hurts the importance placed on your target keywords (known as keyword prominence) and at worst, it prevents your real text from even being seen by the search engine. Either way, these effects are undesirable.

"I have to use frames, is there no hope?"

If you have to use frames, you will want to make sure that your main frameset page is optimized for your target keywords. Make sure it has a relevant title, meta keyword and meta description and that is contains at least a little text on the topic of the keyword.

Avoid Frames at All Cost

The disadvantages of using frames for your web site greatly outweigh any perceived advantage for easier navigation or any desired design effect. I would recommend that you avoid using frames at all costs.