Mobile
In recent years, mobile browsing has become more widespread and sophisticated. The demand for mobile brand experiences have increased and in turn mobile search engine optimization has become an indispensable component on any web marketer’s program. While many of the same basic SEO principles still hold true, mobile web has its own set of unique benefits and challenges.
Key Element 1:
Basic Mobile SEO & Site Architecture
The initial goal is to make sure mobile search engines start crawling and ranking your mobile content
- Adhere to basic SEO site architecture best practices (title tags, heading tags etc.)
- Create a mobile style sheet for your desktop site – handheld.css this allows it to be formatted for mobileviewing and leverage its SEO value
- For the iPhone create a specific style sheet and call it iPhone.css
- To prevent mobile search engines from creating a transcoded version of your site (which often means an under-optimized user experience) include a no transform cache-control in the header for your traditional content
- Include a mobile site map
- Submit a specific site map for each markup language being used
Key Element 2:
Advanced Mobile SEO & Site Architecture
- Use XHTML code to increase the likelihood of rendering well across a variety of mobile phones and browsers
- Use clean code to ensure maximum crawlability for the mobile bots
- In some cases it is more appropriate to create a mobile specific site on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory: www.m.website.com or www.website.com/m
- Redirect common mobile URLs to m.yourwebsite.com
- Include all important functionality of your desktop site on your mobile site
- Rearrange code to make it more appropriate for mobile rendering
- Link the mobile site to the desktop site with a text link containing the words mobile and with a mobile image in the top left corner of traditional site to make sure that it is not cut off by mobile display limitations
- Use server-side browser-detection, redirection then self-selection so mobile users land on the mobile site and desktop users on the desktop site
