If you go to my site: http://www.toptiertemplates.com and click on a link such as "web design templates" on the left side, you'll notice that the page loads in a frame. The entire page does not reload. My only problem is, and this is where SEO comes into play, is that my index page consists only of the images and links and javascript that calls up the tex in the frame. My biggest concern is that the actual index page itself does not contain any body text. Willl this hurt my search engine positioning if I do not have a body of text or will optimizing the index page as it is (optimize the header, alt tags, etc...) be enough?

Frames are really not the best for seo. When I stripped the frames and used SSI for my menu system, everything got better. I'd get rid of them either way if I was you.