We all are aware of SEO on websites, but what about SEO on mobile phones and handheld devices? With the increasing number of smart phones with access to the web, more and more people are accessing the internet on their mobile.
According to comScore M:Metrics reports, in June 2008, 20.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers and 4.5 million European mobile phone subscribers accessed search during the month. This was an increase of 68 and 38% from June 2007, respectively. The U.K. had the highest penetration of mobile subscribers using search at 9.5 percent, followed closely by the U.S. at 9.2%.
Ok so what exactly is mobile SEO?
Search engine optimisation for the mobile client. Which means making sure that a business is as visible as possible on the mobile web and therefore helping that website get as much traffic as possible from search engines.
The market is still early so now is the time to get on board and start developing a mobile seo strategy.
Here are a few things you should put in place on your website
1. The screen size is a lot smaller on handsets than on a pc and many WAP browsers strip out CSS (the style sheet) and therefore the page displays as text. (hence not a nice look)
2. Use valid code. Mobile search engines are unable to digest invalid code.
3. Adhere to best practices, look at W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative.This will ensure that your content is accessible to anyone regardless of their platform — including mobile users and mobile search engines.
4. Follow traditional on-site SEO best practices.
Write short, concise titles.
Link to legitimate and popular Web sites.
Make sure you are not disallowing mobile crawlers from spidering your site.
Keep the URL structure as simple as possible
Keep links descriptive
If you have a mobile page or pages have a link to the PC-based website.
Many believe that Mobile SEO is the future. In an ever-growing industry worth $3.8 billion dollars, it is expected to triple by the year 2012. The number and variety of mobile searches tripled in 2007 and 2009 is already in the works of being the year of the mobile search. But in order to benefit from this latest trend, prominent placement on the mobile Internet is vital. And that’s where Mobile SEO is so important.
A good example of how mobile SEO has taken off is in China. They have the world’s largest mobile market with more than 600 million mobile users. source More people have mobile phones than PCs so they do their browsing on their handsets. According to Reutersthe number of Internet users in China jumped nearly 42% to 298 million by the end of 2008 from the previous year and China now has the world’s largest Internet population. The number of mobile Web surfers surged 113% to 117.6 million in 2008 and mobile Internet is expected to grow agressively in the next few years after the recent issuance of third-generation (3G) licenses.
Case Study of Skin B5
Australian Skin Care company selling vitamin and acne treatment products online wanted to aggressively market its new products in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. However they were having trouble as there was an over-saturated market, using keywords such as “Vitamin B5” and “Vitamin for acne treatment”.
They also had to deal with the Chinese-language search engines where you have to optimize the site for both English and Chinese search engines.
The company turned to Mobile SEO and was able to get higher rankings on keywords that the company wasn’t getting in traditional search engine optimization. Skin B5 executives understood that with more than 200 million mobile users, tapping into this market would be vital for not only their short-term, but long-term success. The result was a 30% increase in sales and today the has more than 100 top 10 search engine rankings.
Now people surf the internet from their pcs but with the advancement of mobile phone technology, more people will be accessing it from their handsets so we better start optimising our websites to be mobile seo friendly.