Domainants is a take-off on the words Domain and Dominants. It is meant to reflect those who are speculating, investing, trading & developing domain names. These people are also often refered to as domainers and the process is often called domaining.
I originally secured it in order to backup another of my domain names, Domainance.com. However, I suddenly realized that when spoken, Domainance could easily be miscommunicated as Domainants. In order to preserve and protect the Domainance name and brand, I also purchased the Domainants domain name, as well. I may later develop Domainants.com as a brand twin to Domainance. But for now, I am using Domainants.com to backup the Domainance.com name and brand.
Domainance is meant to reflect those domains that are dominating the search engines in the search results. It's much easier said than done, and contradicting theories abound. Luckily for you, I am a search optimization maniac of a web designer.
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 arrisen between 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 keep an eye on my writing if you are interested in search engine optimization. However, I should also point out that this very domain name is protecting others I own of similar type.
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!
-Domainants is authored by:
Doug Peters, Symbiotic Design
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