Mobile Website SEO is essential considering the fact that there is a spontaneous increase in the number of users accessing internet from mobiles devices recently. It is important to target the mobile users also for increased page views and conversion rate. Your site should be configured to serve mobile friendly content to the mobile users.
Mobile Search ratio is continuously increasing and search engine giants like Google has different crawler for mobile sites. The Google Mobile Crawler,( the Googlebot-Mobile user agent ) automatically scans your website for content unless you block it using robots.txt configuration. Google Mobile Web Search helps to search for websites or other internet resources that are specifically designed for mobile phones and devices.
This indicates that search results ranking partially depends on how well pages render on the mobile device submitting the query. Your Search Engine Optimization practices should include Mobile SEO in addition to usual website SEO to ensure the mobile content is search engine friendly and gets a better SERP position in Google Mobile Web Search. Almost all the SEO Tips which are applicable to content sites are valid for mobile contents also. Let us discuss the important Mobile SEO Tips.
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- How to Create Mobile Version of Your Website or Blog?
- Best WordPress Mobile Plugins to Create Mobile Version of Blog
- Be Mobile Friendly: Create Mobile Version of Website or Blog
Top 10 Mobile SEO Tips
Ensure the mark-up validity of the content pages
Mobile web pages can be developed in several mark-up dialects like WML, XHTML Basic, XHTML MP and cHTML. WML usage is decreasing gradually. These days most of the mobile content pages are developed using XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language). It is an extended version of HTML. As we discussed in our previous article, XHTML makes HTML more extensible and increase interoperability with other data formats because these XHTML documents are well formed and can be parsed using standard XML parsers. cHTML is commonly used in countries like Japan.
It is important to ensure the markup validity of your pages. Valid content pages are more likely to render correctly on mobile devices.
Test the Mobile Page Validity
There are many different standard tools are available to check the validity of the mobile page markups.
Mobile-friendly XHTML Validator from W2C is the most commonly used service to test your mobile pages. A Web Page is mobileOK when it passes all the tests that are defined in the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification.
Mobile-readiness checker from mobiReady.
Create an optimized landing page for mobile version of your site. Apply all the keyword optimization techniques that are applied for desktop site.
Use Same Premalink for both mobile and desktop sites
It is better to keep the same permalink for mobile content as well as for the desktop content. This will help to avoid duplicate content issue. If you keep the same content in two different URLs , one for desktop site and other for mobile site, search engines like Google may penalize you for duplicate content.
Keep the mobile content lightweight
Avoid using heavy images, flash or any such objects in mobile content. This will make the page heavy. The recommended page size for mobile content is 20KB.
Use different style sheet and theme for mobile site
To make the mole content site fast loading, you can use themes and CSS files that are suitable for mobile sites. Avoid using frames, flash objects, pop ups etc in your mobile page.
Split long content into multiple pages
If you have long article, make sure that is displayed in multiple pages for ease of navigation. These multi page links also helps to minimize site scrolling.
Create Mobile Sitemap
Create a mobile sitemap for your website and submit it to the search engines using Google Webmaster Central and Bing Webmaster tools. Follow the mobile sitemap schema definition.
Read:
Mobile XML Sitemap and Google mobile Sitemap Generator
Add links for proper navigation.
Provide sufficient internal linking especially on the landing page to ensure access to more content and categories in your site. This will help to reduce bounce rate and to increase pageview.
Implement SEO Best Practices
This is the most important point in Mobile SEO. We have discussed a lot about SEO best practices. These are applicable for your mobile site also.
Read:
- Top 10 Essential SEO Tips to Remember.
- A Guide to SEO. Best Practices and Optimization Starter Guide
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