How to Optimize Mobile Websites
This blog entry was posted on February 19, 2009.
The mobile web is moving mainstream with everyone launching mobile websites. Methods for optimizing these websites are still in their infancy. Search engine optimization for mobile websites is not very different from standard SEO practices.
Standards for proper mobile website design are still being established and won’t be mature for some time. Standards for mobile search are even less defined, but we do know what is working today.
- Create mobile friendly content.
- Get spidered and indexed by mobile search engines.
The focus on the mobile web is on making the user experience easy and simple.
Accessibility: Follow W3C Mobile website design best practices and the dotMobi web developers guide to ensure the best user experience. This will ensure that your content is accessible to anyone regardless of their platform.
Keep it simple: Design a simple site structure with clear navigation. Keep the content clean, short and easy to read on a cell phone. Avoid designing sites deeper than 3 layers.
Validated XHTML Code: Use only 100% valid XHTML 1.0 code. It is likely that WML will be phased out in the future as a coding language. Make it easy for the search engines to access your mobile website. Mobile search engines have trouble crawling and indexing invalid code.
Mobile Sitemap: Search engines need to know your mobile website exists in order to spider it.
Links: Each page of your mobile website should have at least one incoming link. From your home page link to a sitemap page. This sitemap should include links to all other pages to help the mobile spiders index and rank your content.
SEO Best Practices: Follow standard SEO best practices such as major keywords in the title tag, H1’s and body text, keyword-rich anchor text for internal links and the content itself. You will have much less text but the text that is there must be keyword rich.
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Grain of salt I guess. — a mystery overall to me….
What?! Ethical? The minute you starting counting 55 charcters for your Title tag, that\’s when the ethics are out the window and the manipulation begins….
Trackback by Grain of salt I guess. -- a mystery overall to me. — October 25, 2009 @ 4:32 pm
Is all manipulation unethical if what you are doing is communicating only the real message? SEO by its very nature is manipulation. But you cross the ethical boundary if you use it to deceive or spam the search engines. Yes, SEO can be used for unethical purposes, but not all SEO is unethical. That is my opinion.
Comment by Doug Williams — October 25, 2009 @ 5:23 pm