First of all, some quick stats on mobile internet and search growth in Australia.
- 43% of Australian mobile phone users can connect to the internet (Nielsen, April 2010)
- In Australia, searching is now the most popular online mobile activity: From 30% to 73% of mobile web users in a year (Nielsen, April 2010)
When designing a mobile website, a common practice is to simply redirect a mobile user to another domain through user agent detection, rather than to optimize the site for mobile searchers. Why then would one need to specifically optimize for mobile searchers, when the user is finding their content via redirects? Good question – Bryson Meunier provides 16 good reasons.
SEO tactics for mobile sites
- Normal SEO rules still apply
- Links from other mobile sites
- Different crawlers (or ‘bots’) for mobile vs web pages
- Search engines can spoof handset user agents to test compliance
- Mobile search engines can transcode pages to match your handset’s capabilities
- iPhones use standard CSS, but offer user a simpler interface
- Coding in strict XHTML is cross-platform compliant
- Mobile versions of normal sites not seen as duplicate content
- Serve your mobile version of your site consistently to mobile bots, and your ‘desktop’ version to normal bots
- Test using handset emulators and validators (e.g. http://ready.mobi/)
