The Difference between Regular Site and Mobile Site Optimization

Did you know that over 75% of people globally possess mobile phones? Did you also know that only 10% of businesses are mobile-ready? This is a shocking ratio for a company that wishes to market its products in the mobile sector.

having a desktop website that is compatible with a mobile device is not enough. Just like you optimize your regular website to rank on search engines, you need to optimize your mobile site, too. SEO tactics  and are not identical across mobile and web browsers. Read on to learn more.

The first step to creating a mobile site is to capture the essence of your desktop site. This means your basic framework will start with following familiar SEO rules. Once this is ready, you need to understand how mobile SEO differs. Keep in mind that mobile indexing and ranking depend on title tags, heading tags and alt tags that are modified for mobile, specifically.

The next step involves creating mobile-friendly content. For this, you need to understand how customers use your mobile site, i.e. what they are looking for and why. Once this is understood, you may consider creating a mobile style sheet which will allows you to format existing pages for viewing on a mobile phone without having to create separate mobile content.

However, some mobile search engines rank the traditional (desktop) site instead of the mobile one, even when there is a suitable mobile style sheet. In these cases, the content is transcoded. This means that it is temporarily hosted on the sub-domain of the search engine. But, this provides an under-optimized user experience. To avoid this, you need an SEO expert to include the ‘no-transform’ cache-control in the header of your content.

Another, desktop and mobile content optimization is  needed to have a separate mobile sitemap. If you are using multiple markup languages, for instance XHTML and WML, you should submit a separate mobile sitemap for each language that exists on the site.

The sitemap, style sheet and no-transform tag should be enough to optimize your site for mobile search engines. But, what about the risk of duplicate content, due to a copy on a sub domain? o use a canonical tag to help get the value from your mobile site to your desktop website.

Keep these tips in mind and create a mobile site that is optimized and user-friendly.

 

Written by Webmarketing123