- A company should ensure its site detects visitors viewing it via their mobile phones, and automatically redirect them to mobile-optimized mirror or alternate version
- Make the name of your mobile website easy to remember. As the buttons on the keyboard are tiny and it’s better to keep the interaction with the user up to minimum. That way, the user won’t get perturbed by endless steps involved in user interaction.
- Just like websites for computers, mobile sites also need a site map which needs to be submitted to search engines.
- Keep all the texts and pictures up to a basic level. Make it easier for the mobile internet user to browse your site. Also, allow the users to log in your site with their username and password from the desktop internet version.
- Unwanted design elements should be avoided so that user doesn’t have any technical blocks browsing through the website. Many mobiles may not be equipped with the software compatible with those technologies.
- Use mobile search engine optimized keywords for your website. Adwords account provides the option for advanced search where you can find out the mobile keywords.
- Have a common URL structure in your website. Urls should also be short to fit the mobile screen. Some standard SEO techniques such as the usage of optimized H1 tags, anchor links with keywords, optimized titles and metadata should be applied.
- Reduce the number of hyperlink texts in the website because it can not only look bad on mobile but can also irritate the user if he accidently clicks the link he doesn’t want to open.
- Mobile internet varies from desktop internet and is used for different purposes than the latter. Mobile users tend to have less patience for slow websites. So target your users and their access their needs.
- Dimensions like location, content formats and devices play an important role in mobile web.
“Less keywords” is the mantra of mobile SEO. Most mobile users try to find out information like airplane timings etc. They don’t want to waste time and efforts typing big keywords in the search engine. - Linking with other related mobile sites also helps increase a company’s relevance when a keyword is used.
- Google’s most recent guidance states that either a 301 or 302 may be used.
- When using user agent detection, be careful of cloaking.
- Don’t redirect all desktop pages to the mobile homepage; instead, use a mobile page which is relevant to the original. If you don’t have a relevant mobile page, consider creating a page which explains this and offers the option to view the desktop version of the desired page and/or alternate pages on the mobile site.
- Be sure to include a link to "view desktop version" on your mobile site (and vice versa). Use cookies to ensure that if a user clicks on this option the user agent detection will be overridden and they will not be redirected again (unless they choose to switch back via the "view mobile version" option).
- Try to use ‘mirrored’ URL structures (so that www.domain.com/hello redirects to m.domain.com/hello, not m.domain.com/xi3l3kxd. This may not be possible, however, if there’s not a one-to-one relationship between desktop and mobile pages.
- For more information on mobile site redirects, see Cindy Krum’s article on ‘generating mobile redirects properly.
- To avoid the appearance of duplicate content, you should use a special mobile rel=’canonical’ tag. This will be covered in more detail later.
Google Analytics
Once you’re happy with the structure of your site, you need to be able to track its usage. Jeff Tirey at Mongoose Metrics recently wrote about their fantastic study which found that on 37% of websites that are a) using Google Analytics, and b) also have separate mobile versions of their site, the mobile version is not being tracked! This is craziness. And it’s simple to fix.
1. Is your tracking code implemented properly?
If you simply haven’t added the tracking code to your mobile site, go do it now. If you aren't sure whether to use the special non-Javascript version, keep in mind that you should be able to ignore the special "tracking a mobile site" option. Instead, you should use the same Javascript code that you use on your desktop site.
The (rare) exception to this would be if you have a disproportionately high amount of traffic from feature phone (non-smartphone) users that you need to track. Feature phones don’t support Javascript, so the normal tracking code can’t track these visits. However, this is an unlikely situation, as most websites don’t see much traffic from these types of phones. If you are worried about it, you can check the site’s server logs for visits from feature phone user agents.
2. Is your mobile site data being tracked through your primary domain?
You should track your mobile site on the same web property (i.e., using the same UA-XXXXX-Y account number) as your desktop site. This requires a simple tweak in the code on both versions in order to indicate to GA that your m.domain.com site is a subdomain of your main site. You should also set up a special profile exclusively for traffic to m.domain.com. To learn more, check out these tips from Google:
Technical SEO
1. Do you have a mobile XML sitemap?
Even if you have a mobile HTML sitemap, it is best practice to create an XML sitemap for your mobile site, and submit it to Google and Bing. To learn more about how to create a mobile sitemap, check out this these instructions from the Google Webmaster Tools blog.
2. How will Google know it’s a mobile site and not duplicate content?
To make sure Google know's your mobile site is a separate entity from your main site, it's best to implement the special mobile rel=canonical tag. In order to indicate to Google that your mobile site isn’t just duplicate content, you can use a special version of the rel=canonical tag. On the desktop page, add the rel=alternate tag:
< <link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.example.com/page-1" >
This tag will point to the mobile version.
On the mobile page, add the rel=canonical tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page-1" >
This tag will point to the desktop version. Simple as that!
3. Make sure you’re not blocking the ‘Smartphone-Googlebot’ from your desktop version in robots.txt, and don't block regular Googlebot from the mobile version.
Bing is a bit more ambiguous in their advice (from March 2012):
"Occasionally, it may make sense to keep some URLs targeted at specific clients (e.g. mobile devices), which you can opt to block from us via the usual methods (robots.txt, webmaster tools) or not." (The emphasis is mine.)
Since the guidance is unclear, I would recommend the less drastic approach. My advice is to allow Bing to crawl your mobile and desktop sites. You can opt to follow my recommendation...or not.
On-page Optimization
1. Are your meta tags mobile-friendly?
Since mobile screens are smaller, there are fewer characters displayed in the SERPs. To adapt to the smaller screen size, it's important that your meta tags be formatted in a mobile-friendly style.
For the best results, your title tags should be kept within 40-60 characters. Similarly, meta descriptions should be kept within 90 characters.
2. Are you targeting mobile-friendly keywords?
It's becoming increasingly important to do your keyword research specifically for mobile traffic. Mobile visitors will likely be looking for different results than desktop visitors, so you must lay the groundwork properly.
Optimizing the content on your mobile site for mobile keywords is also a great way to rank highly in the mobile SERPs (this may or may not be necessary, depending on whether they’re different from your desktop site).
3. Is your site load time too slow?
The goal for your site load time should be around 2-3 seconds. After waiting five seconds for a page to load, 74% of mobile users bounce.
You can check your page load time in Google Analytics. Use your mobile site profile (often the desktop load time is vastly different, which will mess up the averages). If you don’t yet have the data in a separate mobile site profile, you can also check this using your custom segment for non-tablet mobile devices.
Another way to increase you site load speed is to compress large images. Be sure to check other on-page elements, such as Javascript and videos, with a mobile emulator like Google’s Gomometer. Remember that certain formats, such as Flash, aren’t displayed on most mobile phones, so be conginzant of what works and what doesnt. Also, remember to be careful with Javascript in order to use the correct approach for your design.
Extras
I've thrown in a few extra pieces of advice for those of you who made it this far. Keep on reading!
1. Are you missing out on easy eCommerce wins (if applicable)?
To keep your conversion rate optimization on track, here are a few points to consider:
- Ensure the checkout/shopping baskets on your site sync across all platforms.
- Implement larger on-site buttons so that visitors don’t have trouble clicking the correct one on their device.
- Feature a "find-a-store" option.
- Use click-to-call for any phone numbers listed on your site.
- Ensure an easy, ideally 1-click checkout for customers to complete their orders.
2. Where appropriate, are you using structured data markup?
Where it makes sense, use appropriate markup on your desktop and mobile sites. This should allow rich snippets to appear in mobile SERPs.
3. Is your mobile site optimised for local search?
Approximately 40% of mobile search is local. There are two big ways to take advantage of this fact:
- Make use of geo-positioning features, such as the HTML5 Geolocation API.
- Optimize your mobile strategy for Local Search. This also ties in with using structured data (as above).
4. Is your video content optimised for mobile viewing?
Video is one of the most common things people do on their mobile devices. To make the process as easy as possible, consider the following:
- Don’t use Flash for embedded video content; use HTML5.
- Check out these tips on optimizing video for mobile.
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