Mobile Seo

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  Mobile Phone searches are increasing day after day and that year is not too far when we will witness mobile search taking over desktop search. As per the official Google Mobile blogWith a year-on-year growth rate of more than 250%, 850,000 new Android devices are activated each day, jetting the total number of Android devices around the world past 300 million. These numbers are a testament to the break-neck speed of innovation that defines the Android ecosystem.” This clearly gives us an indication of how fast mobile search is taking over desktop search.

 World’s Largest Smartphone Vendors



Mobile Seo Guidelines:How to do Mobile Seo?

With the increasing searches done with the help of smartphones, it has become extremely necessary to start seriously about Mobile Seo. So, what’s the difference between the traditional seo and Mobile seo? Nothing much, just change in the guidelines which are explained below:-

1- Get a separate version of Mobile website

You need to create a separate version of your website for mobile audiences. Google has a unique bot for mobile websites known as the Googlebot-Mobile. You need to present the mobile version of your website to the Googlebot-Mobile and the desktop version of your website to the regular Googlebot.




Do not worry, this won’t result in cloaking. See what Matt Cutts has to say in this regard- 




Some examples of Mobile Sites are given below:-

Desktop Version                   Mobile Version 
 


Ebay India Desktop              Ebay India Mobile
Facebook Desktop                Facebook Mobile
Wikipedia Desktop               Wikipedia Mobile

Mittromney Desktop            Mittromney Mobile

Good NEWS:- You can get a Mobile version of your site free for 1 year. Visit:- http://www.howtogomo.com/ (A Google led initiative helping businesses go Mobile)

2- Use Meta.Txt

Meta.txt is a special file containing the instructions for mobile search engine crawlers. It is a standard for classifying and improving Mobile Web Browsing.

3- Mobile.xml Sitemap

Mobile Seo
Mobile Seo-The next big thing?
(Image Source:- Businessofbrands)

Same as sitemap.html and sitemap.xml, you need to create a mobile friendly sitemap- mobile.xml.An example of a mobile sitemap is given below:-

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
    <url>
        <loc>http://mobile.example.com/pagename.html </loc>
        <mobile:mobile/>



    </url>
</urlset>
 
 

4- Have Mobile friendly content

Mobile friendly site
Having Mobile Friendly Content helps to grow your business (Image source:- Google)

There are several tools available online which could help you to generate mobile friendly content. Some of the well known tools are bmobilized, mobicanvas, mobify, dudamobile etc . Besides this you should have a unique title tag, description tag, H1 tag, image alt tag etc on your website.

5- Follow W3C Guidelines

You should follow W3c guidelines while creating mobile friendly content for your website. A good starting point would be to read Mobile web best practices 1.0

6- Maintain the Site Speed 

Mobile users are faster than the desktop users. They expect faster results and do not go beyond the first 3 results returned by the search engines. This is the reason, search engines have included the site speed as one of its ranking metrics. You need to keep your site simple so that it loads faster and presents the answers to its queries. You may use Mobitest for checking the performance of your mobile site.

7- Use valid XHTML 1.0

XHTML stands for Xtensible Hyper Text Mark Up Language. It is the first document type in the XHTML family. HTML 4 has been reformulated into XHTML 1.0. This version enables easy integration of new modules and enhances user agent interoperability. 

8- Don’t neglect traditional Seo best practices

The old school seo practices needs to be practiced as before. Mobile Seo is not a new science, methods and practices of backlink building (one of the most important metrics of search engine optimization) remains the same. Hence, implement the same set of on page and off page strategies as you did in the past. 

9- Concentrate on Local Seo

People who search with the help of mobile devices search locally. Mobile devices are often used to search local information, hence try and concentrate on best local seo practices, if you are doing local seo. Choose keywords that users are most likely to locally find your business and optimize your website accordingly.

10- Test,Test it

After you have implemented all the changes, you must test your mobile website for its correctness and mobile friendliness. You may use W3C mobile validator to test your website:- http://validator.w3.org/mobile/


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