SEO For Mobile Phones

Mobile internet access is becoming increasingly popular and, to cope with the demand, more and more webmasters are building dedicated mobile sites.

There are a number of differences in the way a mobile site should be set up to optimise for search engine trawlers.

Below as well as exploring mobile SEO you will find some websites where you can test what your website looks like on a mobile screen.

As the world goes mobile, webmasters and SEO consultants are having to adapt their optimisation strategies to tailor towards specific mobile websites. There is a whole different format to mobile sites and, as a result, mobile searches are structured differently than their desktop cousins.

While the usual SEO rules apply, there are a number of specific things you need to be aware of as the webmaster of a mobile site in order to give your site the best chance of ranking highly on the results pages of search engines.

A specific mobile sitemap needs to be created and submitted to different search engines, much in the same way as a regular sitemap needs to be submitted for your site to stand a chance of being picked up by the search engines' crawlers.

In addition, your site needs to permit search engine bots to view it. This might seem rather obvious but mobile sites often prevent anything but mobile devices accessing them by default. Search engines have dedicated crawlers for mobile sites although these are often blocked as they are not recognised as a mobile device. Google, for example use 'Googlebot-Mobile' and so you will need to allow any User agents with that phrase to access your mobile site.

The mobile's site URL needs to be recognisable on a mobile device too. To test this, you could download an emulator and access your site from a number of different mobile device emulators. Most search engines will not include your site in their mobile indexes if they deem it to inaccessible from a mobile device.

If you are operating a desktop version as well as a mobile version of your site, users and crawlers should to be directed to the right site depending on their access point. By implementing this, the search engine crawlers will notice that there are two versions of the site and allow the search engine to return the relevant version of the site to each user.

Often, it is necessary to give the user a choice over which version of the site they wish to use, particularly if the mobile version does not offer the full functionality of the desktop site. A link on the mobile page is sufficient in this case.

Finally, on a less technical note, promote your mobile site as much as your desktop site on your blogs and social media accounts. As more and more people access the internet from their phones and tablets it is important that your customers realise you have a dedicated, easy to use service available for their mobile devices.

Whilst much of what is discussed here is on a fairly technical level, as a webmaster it is extremely helpful if you understand the fundamentals of how search engines crawl mobile sites before approaching an SEO consultant. This way, you can appreciate what the consultant is actually doing once you enlist his or her help and really understand what you are paying for.

With websites needing to re-size for different screen sizes - iPads, iPad Minis, Nexus, smartphones etc etc there are tools available to see what your website looks like on these different devices.

Here is a list of a few of them-

iBBDemo2

Emulates the iPhone and iPad browser

mobiready

This sites checks your website for mobiles

iPad Peek

Checks your website on an iPad

Gomez

Rates your mobile web display

W3C mobile OK checker

Does several tests to check your level of mobile friendliness

iPhoney

Allows you to test small wesbites on how they would look on an iPhone