Mobile Search Engine Optimization: Are You Ready?

If you are serious about your search engine optimization and online marketing strategies; you should definitely be contemplating Mobile SEO. With cell phone technology providing the ability for subscribers to search, visit, view and buy online it is going to be crucial to ensure your site is optimized for mobile phones.

Requirements For Successful Mobile SEO

In order to really optimize your site for mobile users, the first step is to ensure your website is mobile compliant. What does that mean? It means that your pages are formatted for mobile cell phone users.

Mobile users are limited with time and screen space so your pages should be created to cater to these users. If you are unsure of what your site looks like when converted to the mobile web platform, perform a mobile search for your site and check it out.  You will notice that much of your graphics, layout, bells and whistles are simply disabled, turned off and unavailable; when looking at your site through the eyes of a mobile platform, ask yourself a few questions:

1. Is the information most important to your site at the top?
2. Is your navigation still available?
3. Are the font sizes correct?
4. Does your page visibly look good?

If these answers are no, you are not ready for this newly emerging technology.

Mobile phone web pages are created in WML or XHTML and must be W3C compliant. There are new doc types available to place on your pages specifically for cell phone optimized pages, this doctype looks like this:

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN” “http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd”>

When optimizing your website for cell phones, PDA’s and other mobile devices you must think about the amount of space available on the users screen.

Mobile Search Marketing Tips to Consider:

Keep your content short and relevant

Create short titles

Make sure your pages are able to be scrolled through easily

How Popular Is Mobile Search

Right now the top industries who are benefiting from mobile search are currently travel, business and entertainment industries.  Although mobile search is in it’s infancy, major search engines realize the potential of this emerging new venue and revenue stream.  Recently Nokia Mobile selected Yahoo! to provide search results to their subscribers. Microsoft is the default browser and search engine for all windows mobile PDA’s and mobile devices.

A recent study conducted by the Mobile Marketing Association cites that of those surveyed, those who used mobile search most had an annual income of $50,000 to $75,000.   

Mobile search technology is truly in it’s infancy and optimizing pages now can put your site ahead of your competitors; providing an incredible edge.