2010 is the year mobile search need to implement mobile SEO best practices and that’s more important than ever. Optimization evolves in a high speed, and with the emergence of mobile search, staying connected to potential customers, and where and how they search, has just gotten a bit more complex than it was. With global mobil usage around 5 billion and rising, the importance of establishing a strong SEO presence should not be underestimated. More striking is the fact that iPhone users represented about 6% of the smartphone market in 2009, yet drove 70% of all mobile searches. This means that people want to search on their mobile devices, and they just need a capable phone to do it.
What about Links
Not so important.Pagerank? Apparently mobile rankings is not an issue. Developing a mobile search strategy requires a shift in paradigm to drive mobile traffic to your site. With an amalgamation of traditional SEO and new best practices floating around, suggesting changes for mobile optimization could be a potential minefield.
This is a suggestion to prepare your SEO campaigns for success in mobile search.
What to do
The mobile web is different from the traditional web. Your homepage won’t help you here. Instead, you’ll have to recode your site to display properly on mobile devices in order to avoid losing visitors who land on a page of mumbo jumbo script. So, you have to use valid code and that mean that you need to use XHTML (at the moment), and using it well. By using W3C compliant XHTML code on your mobile site, you can ensure that users are seeing the content you want them to see, the way you want them to see it. While you are coding your site, and don’t forget traditional SEO practices. Keyword in headers and content are still effective and should be used, following traditional best practices.
Keyword Ranking
Mobile SEO success is dependent on two crucial factors: location and timing. If a user is searching for “car repairs in a spcific place”, the limited number of mobile sites in combination with a fast upload time for your site could make a small mom and pop auto shop rank just as highly as a Pep Boys in the area.
Keywords for SEO should be targeted, but in a different way than traditional SEO. Instead of focusing on long tail, multi-word phrases, keywords should be adapted to follow the mobile search style. This means shorter keyword phrases, 3 words at most, with geographical information included in highly competitive phrases.
Although this strategy may be of limited importance for global companies, it will allow local businesses to rank for terms in mobile search that are beyond their wildest dreams in traditional SEO, and this is good news for small businesses. Remember to use the word “mobile” in your content.
Microsites
Microsites are an excellent opportunity to provide mobile search capability without revamping an entire site.
Microsites can be adapted to implement all of the best practices listed above, but can be made to focus solely on mobile users, enabling businesses to maintain a traditional homepage for the benefit of non-mobile rankings and users. When crafting your new mobile microsite, keep in mind that display options are crucial when approaching the mobile market. Factors such as image display size, use of java, and varied browser usage should be considered when designing your site.
Conclusion
After your mobile site is near to perfection, you need to submit your site map to search engines’ mobile indexes, then sit back and wait for you traffic to come. But there’s only one small problem with monitoring your traffic: it might not be possible. To track mobile search is not an easy task. Google Analytics, doesn’t work if mobile devices don’t execute JavaScript, making it extremely difficult to judge what traffic is coming from mobile sites and what traffic is coming from traditional SEO efforts. But Google is working on this issue and it will be solved in the future.