Optimizing Your Web Site for Google Chrome

Google’s brand new open source browser debuted the other day, achieving 1% of the Internet perusing market share in no time at all.

This 1% seemed to detract from Firefox’s user base, and it is yet to be determined if more and more people will make the switch from the Internet dominating IE.

In such cases of platform switching, developers need to be aware if their sites are ready for these new up-and-comers.

As far as Google Chrome is concerned, it seems as though it bases its screen rendering on pages that adhere to Web standards (the basis for Google’s own Webmaster Guidelines), so those sites that are intrinsically constructed with standards compliance in mind will fare much better than those sites which trigger less forgiving browsers’ quirks modes.

If people make the jump to Google Chrome, be ready to see many a people not bothering with sites that no longer are maintained and constructed with proprietary syntax and markup. Consider Google Chrome as a marker for a future Internet-wide sweep of garbage collection.

The other notable feature of Chrome that seems ast0unding is its ability to recall pages for keywords that appear within their Web content.

The better your site is optimized for a given keyword, the better the chance that Chrome’s omnibar will recall its URL for a past visitor when the said keyword is used as a search term.

In the next installation of Taming the Wild Wild Web, we’ll discuss tweaking your CSS to deal with a few layout/design inconsistencies you may experience when constructing your pages.

Jeffrey Olchovy is a Web developer, designer and marketing strategist.