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mobile optimization

Create Mobile Friendly Content

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Is Your Content Mobile Friendly?

Does your content mirror mobile user behavior? Do you develop generic all encompassing content for your website or do you create mobile friendly content as well? There are industry benchmarks indicating mobile users searching with a high volume of branded terms that include location or activity based keyword modifiers. This search query behavior does vary from common desktop search that leaves out many of the branded terms. Sources below. This is yet another compelling reason to consider creating mobile friendly content specifically for your mobile audience.

mobile optimizationThe theme for mobile optimization success is to keep it simple. Keep the code simple, keep the design simple, and keep the content simple. To counter the difference in mobile search, it is imperative that your mobile SEO strategy accounts for these differences with tactics and techniques that include location and or activity optimization. Most importantly, make your mobile friendly content easy to find.

Think Fast and Short For Winning Mobile Content

Make sure that your mobile content is not blocked by robots.txt.    If you are all good there, then audit your mobile search critical content to verify that it supports location or activity optimization. Let’s use the example, “Bike Shop, Portland”. If you are targeting a mobile audience for this phrase, begin with a focus on speed and shortness. When possible, deploy short form  factors to the URL of the landing page, the page title, and the meta data. Think about the mobile platform that will display the results, does your page provide concise relevant content to the query and will it render in a readable format on a mobile sized screen?

Microformat Your Mobile Content

A great way to promote your location, category or time sensitive information, is to apply microformatting standards to your content. Terms may vary but, microformat and semantic markup use strict standards to enable your online content to be parsed and repurposed by search engines, browsers and apps. Depending upon the search crawler in use, these bots can recognize the micro-formatted code and provide your encoded mobile content in ways making it easy for your mobile audience to engage and utilize on their mobile device. The application of micro-formatted mobile content helps promote your site as mobile friendly and mobile focused. Additional microformat information can be found in the sources listed below.

Silo Mobile Content

Now that you have made sure that your mobile code is clear, take the next step and make fast and easy to understand. Similar to the way humans process and read mobile web pages, search engine crawlers tend to read the same pages rapidly and value the way the information is presented at least as much as the mobile content on the page. Site architecture is mission critical for mobile success, simple navigational hierarchy is the optimum way to proceed. Don’t forget that your mobile users usually have a different agenda when they are on your mobile site, they don’t need to be bogged down with to many links to click to get to the information they are after. Remember that your mobile visitors want to complete tasks quickly and easily, so your navigational structure for mobile must make this possible. This is commonly referred to as task oriented responsive design. So keep it simple, page titles, headers, micro-content and images should be short, concise and aligned to both your business objectives and visitor goals. This is an excellent way to promote mobile friendly content and a positive mobile experience. #mobilefriendly #mobileSEO

Sources:

  • http://www.accuracast.com/search- daily-news/mobile-7471/uk-local-mobile-search-rankings/
  • http://www.google.com/intl/ en/press/zeitgeist2007/index.html
  • Microformat information: http://microformats.org
  • Mobile compliance guideline information: http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/
social media

10 Mobile SEO Tactics

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10 Mobile SEO Tactics To Add To Your Mobile Strategy

Today’s explosive mobile growth, especially with the abundance of smartphones, mobile OS and apps, makes mobile SEO a very big deal. Knowing that most mobile users use their mobile devices for communications with others (1 to 1 and 1 to many), consumption of media (videos, texts, images, games), and location based searches, here are a few mobile SEO tactics to help keep your business mobile strategy on track for success.mobile seo

  1. Know your mobile traffic Use your analytic data to monitor the size of your mobile audience and learn how they engage with your brand on mobile platforms and mobile devices.
  2. Become friends with bots Google implemented a mobile specific user agent to diagnose mobile site structure and technical issues that may impede a quality mobile user experience. Use this data to refine your mobile SEO strategy. Do not block Googlebot from your mobile site, allow access for all crawlers to both standard and mobile websites to fully index site architecture and to consolidate popularity signals. Check your robots.txt file!
  3. Be responsive For most small businesses, responsive design provides a cost effective way to deliver your brand massage to your mobile audience. Task oriented responsive design further improves the visitor experience.
  4. Hurl a single URL For most businesses, a single URL strategy, deployed via responsive design, is the best approach to deliver your brand message online. Other options are available, dynamic serving or parallel subdomain or subdirectory work as well, but they may require additional technical expertise for implementation and can increase long term costs to maintain.
  5. Mobile canonical A nice to have idea, on regular URLs, add rel=alternate pointing to corresponding mobile URLs. Correspondingly for mobile URLs, add rel=canonical pointing to corresponding regular URLs.
  6. Make indexation crayon clear Do you have a mobile XML site map if your mobile site is considerably different from you regular site? Make it simple, mirror your URLS, make mobile URLs the same as regular URLs.
  7. Be fast, be clean To best prevent crawlability obstacles, keep your code, avoid “code bloat”, don’t use Flash, excessive JavaScript or too much heavy tracking and analytics packages. Search for speed improvements with lighter code, mobile specific content, compressed imagery, smaller slide shows, and improved video platforms. Remember that most mobile visitors are frequently restricted by slower connections and have little patience for slow loading pages.
  8. Understand Referral Sources This is similar to know your mobile audience. If many of your mobile visitors are heavily engaged on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, knowing this fact matters. Some social platforms are geared towards mobile more than any other platforms. Email falls into this category too, as more than 2/3 of emails are viewed on a mobile device.
  9. Concise Content Optimize your mobile content to support mobile visitor intent. Make it easy and simple to complete tasks in as few actions as possible. Make sure your most important page elements and content is identified with short mobile friendly keywords.
  10. Mobile visitors are different Many mobile interactions happen at home or work as a second screen engagement, often while using a laptop or watching TV. When mobile sessions do occur on the go, consider how you have positioned your brand locally. Hyper-location rules in the mobile world, semantic markup using schema.org can improve your visibility for business category identification, business location, positive reviews and special events or promotions.

Mobile SEO is ever changing and rapidly evolving. The dynamic nature of mobile platform change requires some effort of monitoring and willingness to embrace change rapidly. Be on the lookout for emerging social networks or hot apps, they often power a tremendous amount of mobile user engagement. Your mobile SEO strategy needs to account for the high degree of volatility in the mobile space, be every ready to apply new mobile SEO tactics and techniques to succeed by offering the best mobile user experience to your audience. #mobileseo

related: Mobile SEO Strategy

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seo for mobile

6 Ways To Ignite Mobile SEO

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Supercharge Your Mobile SEO Strategy

mobile_300x201The number one focus of mobile SEO is to start with speed. Investigate all actions of mobile engagement and find ways to make things happen faster. Focus on speed to get the lead, speed to get the order, or speed to submit an email or form. Understand where people are in the process and how to get them to the next step in that process as quickly as possible. When you find an obstacle that slows that process down, remove the roadblocks!

6 Mobile SEO Tactics To Help ROI

1. Know where the mobile user is coming from. All referrers are not created equal, many don’t end up triggering your business goals. If you know where the mobile user referral started, you can better understand their motivations and where to direct them. For example, many mobile referrals from social may not be interested in direct sales or lead actions, they be more interested in a service function.

2. Recognize the engagement funnel. Next step in mobile SEO includes some basic mobile analytics. A great tool to use here is a mobile engagement funnel to highlight where mobile users start and where they are trying to go. Mobile visitor actions are key. Follow their actions.  What steps do they take and when do they take them?

3. Success rides on simple navigation. Get rid of useless scrolling, large imagery, multiple steps and excessive navigational options. If there are multiple steps in the process, clearly state that upfront. Limit your links, make it easy.

4. Know the device, know the platform. Simple, align the experience to the devices and platforms. Period. Done.

5. Speed up task completions. If you use a check out or lead intake form for mobile, consider simplifying the form. Ask for additional information to complete the transaction on a confirmation email. People are typing on a smartphone, give them the opportunity to use a larger keyboard for detailed information.

6. Clickable Call-to-Action. Click to call is where the speed is, allow the user to view the CTA without having to scroll down. Increasing impressions on your call to action will only benefit your business. Highlight your CTA visually and significantly increase your mobile engagements.

These are a few simple ways to improve your mobile SEO strategy. Mobile search is a much different landscape than desktop or laptop. Mobile visitors have different objectives and motivations, and they all focus around action.  90% of mobile search results in an action taken (call, form submit, directions), with more than 70% of those actions completed in less than 1 hour. Respect your mobile audience and your mobile visitors to get more accomplished quickly. Focus your mobile SEO tactics on speed to win more business.

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