Marketers now realize that the fast-growing ‘mobile’ users’ specific requirements and demands must be fulfilled for best possible customer engagement. An effort also must be made to leverage the SEO benefit and the conversions gains from the wireless revolution. In this context, which are some of the things to do to avoid mobile search transcoding? And how to perform mobile SEO?

In effect, you will probably have your regular site, a mobile optimized version of it, plus an easily downloadable app all of which can get expensive, time consuming and hard to maintain. So you need to take a call whether it’s worth to invest your money and time in mobile SEO.

It will depend on the number of users who search for your pages mobile devices that throw a mobile search’s transcoded version (essentially means taking out all JavaScript codes). You may find such information from server logs and/ or modules, which analyze user agents. It is not easy to find out real numbers, though. Check the different mobile devices used for visiting your site. For sites with small percentage of mobile devices (with transcoding) searches, it may not be immediate priority.

Study the statistics you have with you to grasp the percentage of your visitors who come from mobile devices. That’s something you need to keep an eye on, to fathom the trend. Very simply, you may create a Google Analytics advanced segment; it’s just a matter of one setting in it and check it at least once a month. You will find out that the keywords and the bounce rate are probably going to be different.

You need to ensure Google does not unnecessarily format your pages for mobile viewing and leverage the advantage of mobile SEO. Make a second version of your site in such a manner that it’s lean enough, in XHTML Basic or XHTML Mobile (an example of this is http://m.ebay.com/), preferably, and then display exclusive version for mobile depending on user agent variable.

For a thorough mobile SEO, we need to ideally carry out the above-mentioned functionality on each page of the site, and not the home page alone. If this is not done, as we click inside pages Google will throw up standard result, which will be transcoded. In other words, a user will get the mobile version only for the home page, which ideally should be the case for all the important inside pages searched for by mobile users.

Initially, you may just focus on the landing pages, which the mobile device users are using. Instead of spending your precious resources redoing the entire site, concentrate on those specific pages, and check their effectiveness to see how it improves the user experience. Once you test those pages for conversions, you can replicate the same for other pages as part for your mobile SEO analytics strategy.