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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Mobile SEO a must in 2011

By now people would have heard the term "Mobile SEO" but some still thinks of doing SEO to non-mobile friendly sites should take care the conversion part of consumers using mobile devices. Certainly not, I suggest starting a separate mobile site with mobile formatted digital content if you don’t have one.

According to comScore, Mobile search was 9 percent of all queries in 2010 and could grow to 20 percent by 2012. So do you want to be one of the person missing in those 20 percent Mobile search audience?

Mobile search engines bots and algorithms are different from web search engines. Googlebot-Mobile and other mobile search engine bots evaluates your mobile site as if they render on mobile phone and they rank results based on how well the site provides information based on mobile user query. The results can be even based on user agent’s evaluation on different handsets like iphone, Erickson phone, LG phone, Blackberry or Samsung phone. To overcome this you need to have the digital content at the top of the page body and an easy site navigation needs to be implemented.

Mobile site SEO is different from normal site SEO. Mobile phone users search behavior is different from desktop users, i.e. Content size, navigational links and user interfaces are different from desktops & laptops to mobile devices.

Here are key points that can help knowing mobile search behavior & optimization

(a) To start with you need to think that you are going to target mobile users and not desktop users. Research & analyze your competitor’s mobile site following factors like mobile user interface, digital content, tags & code.

(b) As said, mobile users are different and as well mobile Search Engines are different like Google Mobile, Yahoo Mobile and Bing Mobile. So do care that your site best fits for mobile users & mobile search bots.

(c) Have a plan to get a dotMobi domain and build your mobile web site, for the best and effective SEO. This has value than 'yourdomain.com/mobile' or 'm.yourdomain.com'.

(d)Make sure that you don't use Ajax, frames, flash and other presentations. Make the site simple and clean. This can help the site to load faster and users & bots can take advantage on fast loading site.

(e) Do use compliant markup language and mobile-friendly style sheets (CSS), means WML (or WAP 1.0) / xHTML and make sure you go for W3C's MobileOK guidelines
http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/
(f) Confirm that your mobile site code is crawl-able by using proper headers and robots.text file.

(g) Take advantage on the mobile predictive search key phrases that can help your business global & local. Optimize the mobile site based on the most preferred predictive search keyword phrases.

(h) Research your mobile audience and competitors rather than desktop audience and competitors. Optimize your mobile site content with mobile search key phrases and categories that your mobile audience will be using.

Mobile SEO

Keyword Global & local completion for desktop & laptop users

Mobile SEO

Keyword Global & local completion for desktop mobile users

(i) Do make sure that you have good level of outbound links and the navigation is easy for mobile users and bots. Avoid deep & complex navigation for mobile sites.

(j) Have your key digital content placed on the top of the page body as the users and bots will find it easy.

(k) Test your mobile site to make sure that the site works properly across various mobile devices, also make sure that the mobile site loads fast.

(l) If your business is on selling products then go for m-commerce site with mobile compactable product catalog, galleries, shopping basket & billing admin with easy login.

(m) Make sure you have a click to call feature for your mobile site.

(n) If your business covers in global and is based on different locations then think of having multilingual mobile site and optimize based on specific location mobile audience.

(o) Do ping your mobile site to mobile search engines and submit to quality directories to build inlinks.

Plan to work on these points to proceed with good mobile SEO. Configure Google webmaster tool with mobile sitemap.xml & as well Google Analytics for you mobile site and see the difference in your business from your mobile audience.