@Chicken
I'm going to have to disagree about your "
search engines do not have a problem with frames as long as they are set up correctly.". When it comes to link building and how search engines work on nearly every single site your index, default, or whatever your homepage file happens to be carries by far the great authority because this is where its easiest to generate organic links. So if you take the strongest page on your site and you start laying out frames with it your throwing away all the strength of this page and just counting on it to cascade down to the internal pages.
Now when it comes to internal pages an effective internal link structure is paramount, if all your navigation links are in one file which is a frame vs every single page on your site this can make a massive difference. I redid my
Web Hosting Reviews, Computer & Hardware Reviews and Articles, and Computer Links :: Dr. MadCow's Educational Resource Portal at the end of 2006. The two big things I did was 1) CSSing the entire template for a cleaner design and 2) On every one of my article pages I added the latest 10 articles, and top 10 articles. By mainly adding these additional internal links my search traffic nearly tripled within 2 weeks because of the internal anchor text and more site strength cascading through the site.
I'm not going to get into a debating war on this one, if you Google
SEO Service out of North America, I'm the Director of Optimization Services at Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. Cheers.