Mobile SEO Best Practices
When it comes to dealing with Mobile Search / SEO, it is important to remember that the mobile audience is much different than the PC audience. Not only do mobile searchers use a smaller screen with a longer load time to display their results; they are often on-the-go, looking for time-sensitive or location based information (flight times, restaurant phone numbers, etc.), and may not have access to a QWERTY keyboard making search a cumbersome process. The goal of Mobile SEO is to make your content easily found by a mobile searcher as well as making their time on your website a simple and streamlined experience so that they’re likely to find what they need quickly and become a return visitor.
Mobile SEO Best Practices
1. Site Content Should Be Easily Accessible
- Flash, AJAX, and frames create roadblocks for the mobile user. Make your site layout simple and avoid unnecessary design elements.
- Remember that the mobile audience has a smaller screen to view your content – keep titles, metadata, and urls short and succinct so that they can be rendered on a small screen.
2. Keyword Research Must Reflect Mobile Search Results
- Google and other mobile search engines provide “predictive” search – ie., after the searcher types a few letters, the search engine tries to predict what is being searched and provides popular keyword options. If you know what keywords appear in predictive search you can optimize your site around those terms.
- Follow all standard SEO best practices including the use of optimized H1 tags, keyword rich anchor links, optimized titles and metadata.
3. Optimize for a Variety of Mobile Phones, PDAs, Blackberry’s, etc
- Use 100% XHTML, cHTML, or WML code
- Follow all mobile web best practices and then have your site validated - http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/ & http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
- Make sure robots.txt is accessible to mobile crawlers
4. Implement meta.txt
- Meta.txt files indicate which URL the user-agent should follow to present the most suitable format to the mobile user’s platform.
5. Submit Mobile Site Maps to Search Engines
- Google, Yahoo and other search engines accept mobile sitemaps
- If your website is location based, also submit to local directories
6. Strategic Linking
- Develop an inbound linking strategy with other relevant, mobile websites to increase your site’s relevancy
- Ensure that you are also linking internally to relevant pages within your own website.
- It is necessary to use keyword rich anchor links for both linking strategies.
7. Mobile SEO Analytics
- Develop benchmarks and analyze your results on a consistent basis
Comments
Comment from Webbiese
Time: October 18, 2008, 4:31 pm
The QWERTY keyboard point is key - was more people have a full or better keyboard on their mobile devices mobile search will explode
Comment from Jamie Harrop
Time: October 20, 2008, 2:07 pm
Interesting post, Kristy.
As with all SEO, the focus should be on the end *human* user. With that in mind, and as somebody who uses a Blackberry on a regular basis to check train times and store opening hours, the key really is presenting the information quickly and easily.
There’s nothing I hate more than to have to let the whole page load and then scroll past logos, navigation and other tidbits before I get to the main content. PDA’s don’t load Web pages in one go. Sometimes, my Blackberry loads a page in five or six batches. I’ll be able to scroll to the end of each section once it’s loaded that batch. If there is a long navigation or something similar, I often have to wait for all six batches of content to load before I scroll all the way down to the real text that I want to read.
Jamie
Comment from System SEO
Time: October 17, 2008, 8:12 pm
Mobile SEO is really uncharted territory - I think we will see more standards set as more people use mobile search.