by Patrick Altoft on January 21, 2009
by Patrick Altoft on July 15, 2008
Following on from my blog posts about mobile SEO and how to make your site mobile friendly a new service called MoFuse caught my eye.
MoFuse takes your existing blog and in a couple of clicks turns it into a mobile friendly site. You can even embed some php code into your Wordpress blog that redirects all mobile traffic to the mobile version of your site.
If you want to take advantage of ad revenue, Mofuse incorporates AdMob banners and Google AdSense into your mobile site. You also get analytics to see who is accessing your mobile blog.
Note that I have yet to implement the php code on blogstorm because it seems to redirect all traffic to the homepage of the mobile blog and I couldn’t figure out what would happen if a visitor arrived at an old blogstorm post.
by Patrick Altoft on July 4, 2008
People searching on the normal web version of Google are given a list of results matching their query. In a simple terms these results are ranked according to the number (and quality) of other websites that have voted for them using links.
In Google’s algorithm a link = a vote and the more votes a site has the more deserving it is of being ranked highly.
When a user is searching for something on a mobile phone two very important variables are added to the equation – time and location. These are so totally unrelated to links that it is impossible to use a link based algorithm to serve up relevant results. When you consider that very few mobile websites actually link out to other sites the issue becomes even more problematic.
Google has a patent that describes how a mobile algorithm could show results based on the users location, the time of day and their previous history. For example if you opened up Google at lunchtime it would display a list of phone numbers for your favourite local pubs before you even had to search for anything.
Opening up Google in the same location at midnight would bring up a list of local taxi firms and pizza shops, again without you having to search for anything.
Mobile algorithms are going to become more and more behavioural based as Google extracts more data from our mobile search habits. The key to ranking well in these algorithms is going to be very similar to the current online methods of ranking in Google Local.
by Patrick Altoft on July 4, 2008
Making sure your website is mobile phone friendly should be a priority for any business that wants to be found on the mobile web.
There are several different methods involved but the first step is to register your .mobi domain. Some people like to actually use the .mobi domain as a seperate website but I prefer to just redirect it to the main domain.
Users are likely to navigate to the main domain anyway so it makes sense to let them use the site as normal.
A lot of sites already use techniques such as CSS and accessible design – if you are one of these people then it’s quite likely your site will already be mobile phone friendly. Mobile browsers range from viewing pages as plain text to behaving very much like normal browsers and it is essential that any features that might not work on certain browsers are made to degrade gracefully.
My preferred method is for developers to ensure that mobile users are sent to a “light” version of the site (if your page sizes are quite small already then this might not be important). The light version might have less content of just have smaller pages optimised for smaller screens.
For example if you detect that the user is visiting on an iPhone you might like to ensure that the page outputs at 320×480 pixels.
If you choose to switch users to “light” pages then make sure your users have a way of moving to the real version of the site somehow. The scripts listed below offer methods to detect a mobile browser user agent string (server side) and display content accordingly.
Once you have created a mobile friendly website you can use the W3C Validator to check that all is well with the design.
One of the main points to note when designing for mobile devices is that lengthy navigation should be placed (if it has to be used at all) at the bottom of the page. Nothing is more annoying for users than when they have to scroll before they can see the content on your page.
Mobile web design isn’t fully evolved yet and there are lots of opinions about best practice. This, along with the speed handsets are evolving, makes it essential to keep up with the latest trends.
by Patrick Altoft on July 4, 2008
Mobile SEO is quite a confusing term. I’ve been around the SEO industry for years and am involved in mobile application development but still the term is confusing.
The reason it’s confusing it because nobody quite knows what mobile SEO actually involves. In a new series on Blogstorm I will take a look at what mobile SEO actually means.
The definition of SEO to me is helping a website to get as much traffic as possible from search engines so it makes sense to apply this to the mobile arena as well. On this basis the goal of mobile SEO should be to make sure websites get as much traffic from people searching on mobile phones as possible.
However this is where the issue gets complicated because not every mobile web user actually wants to visit a website – some of them just want a phone number. If you can optimise a listing on a directory such as Google Local so that a client receives more phone calls then this is probably going to give a much greater ROI than sending traffic to the website.
So really we can revise the definition to say that mobile SEO is about making sure that a business is as visible as possible on the mobile web. Whether that involves people seeing your phone number, finding your shop on a map or actually visiting the website is irrelevant.
There are of course a number of steps involved in promoting your business to mobile phone users so in a series of posts I will look at the options available and the best practice solutions.
If anybody has experience in this area then guest posts are welcome.
