Mobile Web SEO Strategy

Structure & Rendering of Mobile Sites

Mobile SEO strategy

Best SEO Mobile Performance

Risks of Mobile SEO

Web based Mobile Platforms

The Mobile Web

Your Mobile web strategy and visibility relies hugely on the design of your website. Whether you create a separate mobile version of your site on a subdomain off your traditional website, or whether you use css style sheets on your existing site to help with rendering on different mobile handsets, mobile search engines do not index your website for search in the same way as your traditional desktop search engines would.

The mobile web is growing at a fast pace, and the way in which people browse it is very different to traditional desktop browsing. People trying to build up a web presence on the mobile web must realize that the majority of your mobile audience is not looking for the same information that you desktop audience is looking for.

Lately we have seen a huge increase in Location based and real time searching on mobile handsets. More and more applications are being used to browse the web in different ways as opposed to just using Google as their only means of search.

1. Structure & Rendering of Mobile Sites

It’s important to keep testing to see if your site renders across various mobile devices, especially the new more popular handsets that enter the market. If you are a more robust e-commerce site, consider creating an m-commerce site (mobile site) with specific mobile galleries, product catalogs and shopping baskets and simple billing management as well as ease of login etc.

You should be trying to make the usability as simple and direct as possible, especially for large sites with many pages. You do not want clutter that will only lead to slow download time, poor conversion and possibly poor rendering.

For smaller businesses, ensure that you set up a mobile site with basic features that include: Text, graphics and video. “Click to call ads” are hugely important now due to the increase in real time and location based searching.

A customized design, with branded elements to match your existing web site will help create further brand awareness as well as a decent user experience for your mobile audience. Of course in many cases you do not have to create a “separate mobile site to your own traditional site. There are other options….

If you have done a good job on your traditional SEO, to begin targeting your mobile audience you could create a secondary mobile style sheet for your traditional site, and call it “handheld.css.” This will allow you to format your existing pages for viewing on a mobile phone without having to create separate mobile content.

This method allows you to use the SEO value that you already have on your existing site without creating new pages. This is a great way to avoid creating a separate mobile website which in some cases can be deemed as duplicate content.

You can also use the mobile style sheet to block things from being rendered using a “display: none” attribute in the stylesheet. Many website owners know that their mobile audience do not want to see certain things on their mobile version of their website, this could be either because it’s not relevant to their mobile browsing habits or because it might take too long to download. Many new Mobile phones (except iPhones) will automatically pull the “handheld” style sheet and display a mobile friendly version of a website.

iPhones are bit different, and do not look for mobile “handheld” style sheets. Even though the iPhone is meant to render full web pages, research has shown that some people can still prefer mobile-formatted content on iPhones. Due to the “on the go” browsing habits that have developed lately, people usually want to find out something quick when browsing on their phones and do not need to navigate through a whole website to find it.

To address this problem, you could duplicate your handheld sheet to create one that is specifically for the iPhone, and call it “iPhone.css.” Of course this is what makes Apps so successful, is that they are specifically designed for the ultimate mobile experience, without having to worry about CSS, rendering issues, or duplication problems.

The PC experience is much more tolerable, searching from the comforts of your home or office is much more enjoyable than trying to navigate a 2-4 inch touch screen while walking down a busy street or riding on a bus.

2. Mobile SEO strategy

In some cases, mobile search engines will want to rank a traditional page from your website, but deem it ill-suited for rendering on a mobile phone, sometimes even if it has a mobile-specific style sheet. In this case, the mobile search engines could rank your traditional content, but “transcode” it for viewing on a mobile phone.

This transcoded version of the site is then hosted on a temporary sub domain of the search engine. Sometimes this can provide an under-optimized user experience, because navigation is sometimes misplaced or broken, and single pages are broken into multiple pages for faster download time. This is also a problem for tracking the activity on your mobile site, and if anyone links to your content, your website may not get the benefits from these links.

It’s important to include a mobile site map to let Google know that you are targeting a mobile audience so it can index your webpage on different handsets accordingly. Google has a tool that can help you build a mobile sitemap. If you are using multiple markup languages, for instance XHTML and WML you should submit a separate mobile sitemap for each language that exists on the site, this makes it easier for indexing and for better visibility across multiple handsets.

Optimization Techniques:

As the web quickly becomes more mobile and social than ever, we see apps filling voids that were mostly left empty throughout the history of search and social media.

Applications are altering mobile SEO. Mobile searchers are actually turning to mobile search applications instead of web search. These include mobile search portals like WikiTude, UrbanSpoon, RedLaser and Shazam and many more.

Optimize for Local Search - It is not just about the Yellow Pages anymore. Ensuring that your site is well optimized for local search will mean that people should be able to find you when they are looking for local resources.

With Google’s new “Click to Call” ads, businesses can now be found by local search and simply called directly from a handset with the click of a button whilst the user is still on the search listings page.

Many search applications on smartphones are now using your GPS location to give you more personalized and real time search results. Also, with new “check-in Apps” like Foursquare and Gowalla you can now advertise directly to an individual’s mobile when you know if they are in a nearby location of your business. This is making Mobile SEO increasingly hard to track and analyse.

The applications are bringing mobile SEO to a new level, where businesses can track down potential customers based on location, instead of having to wait to be indexed in Google’s SERPS , where they might not ever be found.

Downloadable search applications have different input mechanisms that can make them more fun, more interactive or more useful, and in many cases, the results tend to be more specialized and provide more information than a regular mobile web search.

Further Optimization:

As part of your mobile SEO efforts, ensure that: Page Titles are optimized with relevant keywords being used by your mobile audience, Landing pages are optimized with relevant keywords being used by your mobile audience. Remember that your mobile audience browsing habits are completely different to your traditional desktop searcher.

You can use Google Mobile AdWords to promote your brand via mobile ads. Sponsored search results on Google Mobile work on a pay per click as well as a pay per call basis. But with more and more people using different search application for handsets it remains to be seen if Google AdWords and other sponsored ad platforms will be a success on mobile handsets.

However, if more and more people are using Apps and mobile search portals, then what implications does this have for SEO in Google’s search listings? Are we going to have to start looking more at Geo Targeting as an SEO strategy for mobiles?

3. For Best SEO Mobile Performance

1. To ensure that your traditional content will work on a mobile phone you should practice code in strict XHTML. This will give you the best chance of rendering well across the highest number of mobile handsets and browsers.

2. Untidy HTML or bad JavaScript can really cause problems on some mobile browsers and can also impact download and rendering time of pages. Making sure you have clean code will create an efficient crawl for the mobile bots, ensuring that they index as much as possible.

3. If the pages on your traditional site don’t use external style sheets, have a large file size, sloppy code or lots of multi-media content that could have trouble rendering on mobile phones, you might need to create mobile-specific content on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory (such as www.m.yoursite.com or www.yousite.com/m). A .mobi domain is a top level domain approved by ICANN that is restricted for mobile devices and sites. You can visit http://mtld.mobi/ for more information on this matter.

This can be problematic for SEO, because it can split your links and therefore decrease the authority being passed on by these links. But in terms of usability, it could be a good option for some.

Ideally, mobile search engines would be able to see that you have both mobile and traditional content, and would choose to rank your mobile content above your traditional content in mobile search. Unfortunately that is not the case yet.

In most cases, your mobile content is competing against your traditional content in mobile search results, even when it is on a mobile subdirectory or mobile subdomain of your existing site. The mobile content is newer, has fewer links and sometimes, less content so it may be at an algorithmic disadvantage.

4. You should be linking between the traditional site and the mobile site with a text link. It is important that the link goes page-to-page rather than from any page on the traditional site to the home page of the mobile site, or vice versa.

The link should be on the word “mobile” or “iPhone” if you have an iPhone-specific site. This is a signal to give the search engines that the mobile content is optimized for mobile viewing, and should rank well in mobile search results.

Placing this link in the very upper left hand corner of the traditional page might be a good idea. This is because when traditional pages render on mobile phones, in some case the right site of the page is cut off or not displayed without side-to-side scrolling.

4. Risks of Mobile SEO

Creating a copy of your website and putting it on a subdomain risks duplicate content issues. In many cases the mobile search engines are not smart enough to understand the duplication.

In this case, your newer mobile content has little hope of ever outranking your older traditional content, even in mobile search. While the browser-detection and redirection should take care of this issue, the duplicate content also risks draining a bit of the SEO value from the content on the traditional site.

The best thing to do to try to combat duplication is to try using the canonical tag to push all the SEO value from your mobile site back to your traditional site, and then rely on your browser detection and redirection to take care of the rest.

The small risk here is that you could damage your rankings for searches on the less sophisticated phones, because you are pushing all the SEO value to the non-mobile content. If that doesn’t work,you could use your robots.txt file to block the traditional crawler from reaching your mobile content, and potentially also blocking the mobile crawler from accessing your traditional content. This can be a bit risky, but could also improve the efficiency of both crawlers, keeping them focused on the content that is most relevant to them.

5. Web based Mobile platforms

Some website owners use web based mobile platforms to help “mobileize” their site, Most mobile platforms just take the existing content on your traditional page and remove all complex code, leaving simply text and a minimal amount of images.

Because they are web based, they may include the mobile content on a subdomain of their main domain, rather than including it on your domain. Example: www.yourdomain.theirdomain.com.

For SEO purposes, this means that you are building up their domain’s authority rather than yours, and they have all control of the hosting. Any links, traffic or rankings that your mobile content accumulates are actually accredited to their domain rather than your own.

For more information on how to implement an effective SEO Strategy for your business:

To Read more on Mobile SEO and what direction it is going, check out our Mobile Phone SEO webpage which takes a broader look at the mobile web.

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