>I really want to use frames, but I'm worried it will mess me up in Alta Vista, etc.
>What should I do?
I promoted a site in the past in the software industry that was written in frames. I was at #1 on the top 10 search engines over the period of 6 months, and I used no meta tags at all, just the noframes page- Be sure to insert text links in the noframes section to allow all the spiders to get throughout \your entire site. Good luck.