With more than 40 million users (and counting), the mobile Internet has reached critical mass, according to Nielsen Research. Smart phones, meanwhile, are soaring in popularity. Apple’s iPhone is a game-changer, and Blackberries, once reserved for road-warrior high-tech executives, are now commonplace. In fact, 84.8 percent of iPhone users and 58.2 percent of total smart phone users access news and information from their handheld device; whereas 58.6 percent of iPhone users and 37 percent of smart phone users visited a search engine on their phones (mMetrics).
Used to be that mobile sites had to be technically constructed for the mobile channel and reside on special mobile-only .mobi domains. But that’s changing. Smart phones may have smaller screens, but they now boast “real” web browsers. (In the case of the iPhone, they use Safari, the same browser that’s bundled with full-size Macintosh computers.) The screen might be smaller (Okay, much smaller), but much of the technical heavy-lifting has been eased.
That’s because Google and Yahoo! now transcode (a “webby” term coined to define the process of translating digital content from one device to another) the websites mobile users find in search results on-the-fly, and presents (at least in theory) versions of those sites that are visually optimized for the mobile device that did the searching when a user clicked on a search result. So technically, if your already-optimized site looks good on a variety of mobile devices when you arrive on it from a mobile search result, you should be good to go. But be aware that transcoding works only through search. So, the user experience is harder to control on mobile platforms.
Both Google and Yahoo! enable you to submit a mobile site to be spidered by their mobile crawlers. Before doing so, have your webmaster validate that the code is 100 percent XHTML-compatible. Mobile spiders have more trouble understanding invalid code than do their more traditional counterparts.
Having done that, stick with SEO basics: major keywords in the title tag, H1s and body copy, keyword-rich anchor text for internal links, as well as both out- and inbound links. But keep mobile behavior in mind. Mobile users are more inclined to use shorter search queries due to keypad limitations, so ensure that keywords are optimized for the shortest possible term a searcher might use. If they’re hungry, they’re more likely to look for “pizza” than “pizzeria,” for example.
Sounds easy, right? Well, not so fast. Users have much less patience when it comes to mobile search. Don’t expect them to go past page two of search results. And with Google only displaying five results on a mobile search engine results page, those two pages display only 10 results. With that kind of competition, mobile search is going to become much more fiercely competitive than web SEO for top-ranked search results.
When it comes to the mobile Web, user experience and usability are everything. Screens are small; users are on the go and want results—fast. If mobile search and mobile web users matter to your organization (and mobile is increasingly important for local businesses when people are looking for a theater, restaurant, or drug store), you might have to consider extra measures to make the site more mobile-friendly. This holds particularly true for sites that don’t render well in transcoded versions from Google and Yahoo! searches.
In those cases, you have three options:
• Create mobile-only pages—Create mobile-specific pages for designated portions of your website. The pages will be narrower, have less functionality, contain smaller images, and will have navigation adapted for mobile users. With this approach, all that’s necessary is to update code that already exists. The drawback is that the site’s homepage will likely have to work on mobile browsers, or alternately, an extra click will be required to get from the traditional home page to the mobile one.
• Create a mobile/traditional hybrid—This model calls for one set of site content (unlike the mobile-only pages option, which duplicates content), but at least two sets of CSS: one for PCs, and an alternate mobile version. In fact, you can build multiple versions of CSS to accommodate different mobile browsers. Each is automatically pulled by an appropriate browser. This approach eliminates the duplicate content problem, but it’s not going to be 100 percent reliable. Mobile devices just can’t be counted on to select the right style sheet all of the time.
• Use dynamic mobile pages—This is the most foolproof—as well as the most costly—alternative. Pay a programmer or developer to combine your content database with a user agent detection to transcode the site on-the-fly. In addition to the cost and work levels involved, it’s a short-term solution, due to continually changing mobile technology. But this is your best bet if you want to offer users the best possible experience and also bake the highest level of SEO into a mobile site.