Mobile SEO should be on your agenda one way or the other, as the devices has penetrated almost every aspect of our lives, including infotainment, search, research and purchasing – offline and online. An optimized site for cellphones and tablets will allow you to leverage the search activity done on them. Here are some handy ideas to ensur that your ‘Mobile SEO’ exercise is efficient and successful:
Structure vital keywords for predictive search
The Google query on its Mobile Search is on average 15 characters long. To complete the enquiry, it mostly relies on predictive phrase as well as query suggestions. It is very important to place yourself in some of the most common ‘predictive search phrases’ related to your industry and location.
Identifying keywords more likely to be dished out by Google Mobile Search, when users are seeking products or services of your domain, holds the key to efficient Mobile SEO. It will make sure that your site is able to garner a significant chunk of mobile traffic. Apart from making your keywords relevant to mobile users, submit your site to the relevant portals, business listings services and directories that will act as vital sources of mobile traffic.
Treat rel=canonical as your URL’s best friend
If you’ve ‘smartphone’ content (generally a normal HTML page tweaked in layout a bit for smaller displays), you can make use of the rel=canonical so as to point to your desktop version. This is what Google’s Webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller, has recently stated regarding redirects and rel=canonical: “Keep in mind that sites for smartphones are technically ‘normal’ sites, and we don’t treat them specially.
“We only treat traditional mobile content (WAP/WML/etc) differently, crawling them with a separate Googlebot and creating special search results for users of those devices (one reason for that is that they generally couldn’t view normal, modern websites on their devices). For smartphones, we tend to treat them as normal desktop browsers, showing them “normal” search results. With that in mind, we try to avoid showing traditional mobile content in our normal search results; you don’t have to do anything special to prevent that from happening.
On the other hand, we may show smartphone-optimized content in our normal search results, because it is generally normal HTML content that can be viewed with any modern browser. To prevent that from happening, the rel=canonical can be used to make sure that we focus on the desktop URL. For smartphone users, the redirect from the desktop version to the smartphone version makes sure that they have access to the optimized content.”
In essence, when Smartphone users check that conventional page, they can be redirected to the more compact mobile version. Applicable in almost any URL structure, this structure makes separate smartphone subdomains/ subdirectories unnecessary for smartphone-mobile sites. Even better option, however, is to utilize the same URLs and to present the appropriate version of the content sans a redirect.
