Getting Number One on Google with Frames!

If you thought I was going to give out some magical secret as to how you can achieve this result, sorry, I’m merely pointing out that it can (and has) been done! Earlier this week I was analysing local web design firms in Adelaide, Australia, and I noticed something interesting about the website that came up in first place for the phrase “website design Adelaide.”

After looking closer at the website and running some quick tests, I still have no idea how it got there and how it seems to have been there for a good period of time!

My initial observations: The home page title contains the words “website design Adelaide” as you would expect (but so do the title tags of most of the top ten results). Here is where it gets interesting.

1. The website uses frames
2.  The menu system is all images with no ALT tags
3.  None of the images in the body have ALT tags
4.  There are a total of 62 words of body text of the home page, where “web site” is mentioned once in the title, but this is the only occurrence on the page and is not in the URL
5.  Adelaide is mentioned nowhere on the page
6.  Page names linked from the menu are named “frame_service” and “frame_clients” (obviously not taken the wrong way by their clients!)
7.  They have a PageRank of 5!

I thought I’d explore the index page of the site using some of the SEOmoz Tools.

I used the SEOmoz Term Target Tool to check the competitor’s site for “Website design Adelaide.” The result is below:

You see below also that all the counts for the phrase are 0.

The SEOmoz Term Target Tool also told me that there were no In Pointing links.

The SEOmoz Page Strength Tool gives the page a value of 3.5/10. 

A quick click on the Google “Cached Site” link under their number one listing returns a blank page “as retrieved on 22 Nov 2007 13:40:18 GMT.”

The SEOmoz Backlink Anchor Text Analysis revealed the only backlink text is the business’s name. My next step was to enter the URL into Yahoo! Site Explorer to find that there are:

1. 11 pages are indexed, with most having one word titles such as “clients,” “services,” or “contact us”
2. They have around 1,300 links; however, about 1,150 of these come from two of the sites they designed with their business name as the link text
3. They are listed in DMOZ (ODP)

Important Notice: I think its probably an important time to mention that I’m not having a go at this website design company in any way, shape, or form; in fact it’s quite the opposite. As someone who spends a lot of time optimising websites for clients, I am IMPRESSED (and slightly stunned) that they have been able to achieve this result with a frames and predominantly image based website!

I decided to do a ranking check on Yahoo!, MSN, and Google as well as Yahoo! Australia, MSN Australia, and Google Australia. Here is what resulted in a ranking check for “website design Adelaide”:

Not only is this website number one in Google.com for this term, they are also number 3 on MSN! 

Now I know there are a lot more factors out there determining these ranking positions and that I could have gone into a lot more detailed analysis; however, I also know there are lots of people who visit the SEOmoz site and Premium members with more experience than myself, who may have seen this type of site ranking well before and may be able to shed some light on how it manages to hold the number 1 position!