Mobile SEO

When it comes to making sure a mobile site is visible to mobile versions of leading search engines, development strategies can sometimes get a little unstuck. Find out how to improve a mobile site's visibility.

We’re all aware of the benefits of making a website highly visible to search engines (if you’re not, you should get in touch with us asap!).

Millions of users use search engines to look for services and tools each day – even when they know an organisation’s website address – so it’s common sense that you make sure your website can be found fast, and preferably first.

Alas, when it comes to mobile SEO and making sure a mobile site is just as visible to mobile versions of leading search engines, development strategies often become unstuck.

As with traditional website optimisation, the best results for mobile search often come from strategies which have been planned and implemented from day one of the mobile development process.

Fortunately there a number of administrative and technical approaches that organisations can adopt to help increase inbound traffic to a mobile site.

Create a mobile website domain name

Identifying your site correctly as a mobile site can help with mobile SEO efforts because users and search engines need to easily distinguish it from your standard website, which, depending on how it’s built, may not perform too well on mobile devices.

Adopting a mobile specific domain is fast becoming an industry standard in distinguishing mobile sites from their web counterparts. As mobile browsing becomes more widely available, the mobile URL standard will be recognised by the vast majority of mobile web users.

Ensure your mobile site observes best practices

As with websites, your mobile strategy should mainly use specific mobile mark-up languages for example xHTML mobile profile and WML and given that these are XML based, you need to ensure that all mark-up is well-formed. Although the new Nokia Series 60, Apple iPhone, Google Android and some older devices like Blackberries support HTML well, your mobile site should adopt mobile mark-up.

Sites should declare basics such as image size and alt tags. Not adding this information to images actually makes a mobile device work harder, and could affect your mobile pages’ indexing in mobile search engines. Make sure your site validates against the Document Type Definition (DTD).

Never use frames as the vast majority of devices don’t support them. Be cautious of using multiple redirects – as little as four redirects in a row can cause some devices to fail to reach the intended page for example older Sharp models.

Add site headers and tailor style sheets

Adding in content-type and cache-control headers will help define a mobile site better. As well as improving the chances of your site being indexed by search engines, it also stops mobile devices’ attempts to further adapt your site to fit its mobile screen – and potentially your carefully thought out presentation. It’s a tiny amend, but also make sure your style sheets screams ‘MOBILE!’ by adding the relevant code into the link tag.

Ensure you have a registered and up to date mobile sitemap

Search engines like sitemaps because they can help it index your site’s pages. So as well as optimising your site’s metadata and keywords, make sure your mobile sitemap reflects as many of your site’s pages as possible.

Contextualise all pages

Mobile websites are often geared towards highly mobile users who are always on-the-go and as a result, often contain many transactional pages – be it for train timetables, ‘search for your nearest…’ and so on.

Sadly, transactional pages and input forms often lack any text which provides any introduction or context for the page. To improve a page’s chances of being indexed by a search engine, don’t risk relying on metadata. Ensure that any page which requires a user to complete fields also contains text that puts it into context.

Set up reciprocal links between mobile sites

Try to set up links to your mobile site from other mobile sites. Reciprocal linking strategies are commonplace when launching a new website, so allocate some time to repeat the process for your mobile site.

…and finally – mobile advertising

It’s vital that you adopt a long term best practice approach to your mobile site’s technical development, but if you really need your mobile site to be highly visible from day one, set aside marketing budget to create a highly targeted Pay Per Click (PPC) search ad campaign on mobile search engines. Paid for ads should always support more ‘organic’ optimisation techniques but it does help site owners rapidly promote a mobile site’s unique benefits to highly targeted audiences.

To find out how Cimex can help drive your mobile strategy, “contact us”/contact.

Published: 10 Nov 2008

Tags: Mobile, Seo sem & content