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Domainance is the act of dominating the search engines with your domain name. It's much easier said than done, and contradicting theories abound. Luckily for you, I am a search optimization maniac of a web designer.
In order to design a website with the expressed purpose of dominating the search engine results for your targetted keywords, you have to forget about them. That's right, the search engines themselves should not be a factor in how you design your website. The only thing that should be a factor in your design is accomodating your visitors. Yes, you heard me, you actually have to design for the human element, not the search engines, their crawlers or the algorithims they use to decide ranking, your vistors!
The reason is because this is specifically what both the search engines want, as well as what visitors to your website expect. Trying to modify your website according to the latest trend in SEO (search engine optimization) is actually an attempt at manipulating the search resluts according to the results that you want. But the very act of designing for a bot or algorithim denies users the experience they require. The end result is actually most often that you may get onh the first page of the search results, but you are getting fed meaningless traffic from surfers who are simply browsing the web with no serious intentions to purchase or even contact anyone about your services.
The one thing that SEO practices definitely does increase, is spam. You will get more unrelated and unwelcome spam emails from every joker in the world, and some won't even speak (or write) English, they merely sell any working email address to anyone buying them. This is a vicious cycle and many busionesses are swamped with so many commercial spam email solicitations. These spammers are finding you because you are doing well in the search engines for some keyword. Possibly not even one that you suspect.
The main point here is that your focus needs to be your customers and your visitors, not some machine or mathematical equation. By providing what your visitors require and going beyond their expectations, you gain repeat visitors that are likely to convert into customers. With customers, you have repeat website traffic and word-of-mouth that allows for new leads and new potential customers. The whole issue is that webmasters and site issues are addressing unrealistic trends while not accomodating the requirements of their potential clientel or even impressing upon them a positive user experience.
The whole key to this thing is the user experience. This is what we, at Symbiotic Design, try to provide our website design clientel. Sure, we understand search engines. We have to in order to provide quality coded websites that a search engine won't stumble over during it's crawl. But, the whole point of the search engines such as Google is to reflect and echo real user based traffic and experience for a website. And search engine giants suchy as Google are hard at work at perfecting that very reflection of the human experience.
So, now-a-days, your code is extremely important because it reflects the professionalism of how a website should not only be designed, but maintained, as well. And how creative your online experience will add to a user's online experience of your brand and web presence.
Today's W3C (the WorldWide Web Consortium) and other independent groups (such as the WHATWG, who is developing HTML5 standard) are developing new web code standards and extending existing web coding standards that web designers must continue learning just to stay in the game. This is something that we are passionate about at Symbiotic Design, continuing to learn new standards and provide our customers with an excellent website for which to communicate with the world.
An example of how technology has advanced over the years is that we used to use HTML tables as a hack to design layouts. Back then, in 1996, there just wasn't any other way. Although, soon after CSS was introduced, and this web standard offered designewrs the ability to separate presentation code from markup code. Unfortunately, CSS was young and really wasn't a viable option until Microsoft release of Internet Explorer 7, because nearly 90% of web users were using it at the time and Internet Explorer has notoriously undersupported the more mature CSS2 and CSS3 standards.
When I first started learning how to code my school web pages in HTML, there was no such thing as CSS. Since then, and ever so slowly, CSS has grown-up and only lately (since IE8's release) has Microsoft IE finally become a usable (if still quirky) modern browser. Unfortunately, it is also the choice browser of most of the web browsing world.
Anyone who knows better will grab a much better browser such as one offered in the FireFox, Safari, Chrome or Opera packages. But most of the computing world probably doesn't want to install anything because they don't know how, or they just don't understand how their computer works and are superstitious about installing anything they already have. But please understand that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is an absolutely pathetic peice of crap. It really should be outlawed because it holds the whole of the web design and development industry back for ages at a time and barely supports any of the standards we need it to once it is released.
Living with IE is like living in the dark ages. It is just that bad. And this is key to understanding how to design, because Internet Explorer will always get in the way. And in the end, IE requires way too much code to correct (or hack) it's incompetence away and winds-up killing our web pages.
Is it hard to believe what I will suggest next? Simply by leaving out support for IE, your website will load faster and your code will render faster.
Ah, but half of the world uses IE, how will your customers view your pages if you don't have IE support? Well, I'm not telling you that. But look at it this way, if you design and develop using standards compliant code (see the w3c for more information on standards compliant code & design), then IE will, eventually, support your current pages at some stage in the log-off future. But for now, when you first start developing your website, don't even concern youyrself with IE.
The reason is simple, Google is the real big player in the search wars. Googlebot al least was a Mozilla based crawler. I believe they are now using thier own product, the Chrome browser, which is based on the same Gecko Engine that is. So go ahead and leave out all the IE hacks and fixes. Googlebot doesn't need to see all the extra crap. And the less crap it has to crawl, the more content it can download even faster.
Once you are done coding your site's design templates in FireFox or another standards compliant browser, then you can address IE's issues. But don't fix your templates with the IE hacks. Instead, make a separate template just for IE. Then, in the original templates that are optimized for standards compliant browsers and Googlebot, redirect IE browsers to the pages overladen with all those IE fixes.
Remember that Google has already announced that they are now ranking websites based on how fast they are delivered content. But no matter how fast your server is, you can always reduce its load by leaving out the overhead. MSN will probably come to crawl your site and you might not aquire as many points for the redirect, but Bing is small and hasn't really materialized as the major player everyone expects them to be. So who cares? They just don't matter in the grand scheme of things as far as search goes.
OK, back to understanding the code. A defined line has Instead of having a whole separate code for presentation (CSS) and the structure code (HTML or XHTML, etc...) of a website. Never use CSS code inline, and never put it in the head of a document. The reason is simple, Google has to crawl anything within the page. Always load your CSS Styles, and any JavaScript that you might have, in from external files. This reduces the code overhead that Google has to crawl before it gets to your content.
Thanks for reading my views and thoughts. I am only begining this venture and I do suggest that you return if you really want to domainate the search engines with your website(s).
You will have to make-up your own mind about the kind of things that you want to do and the approach you will take. But remember that what is commonly referred to as "Search Engine Optimization" (or "SEO") can be simply boiled down to Search Optimization. And instead of worrying about how we want a bot or algorythym will behave we can use what search optimization will deliver, good search results. And guess what? That's what the search engines want, too!
-Domainance is authored by:
Doug Peters, Symbiotic Design
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TNT Parking
Free domain parking with content management.