Mobile SEO Best Practices 2012

Popular mobile trends marketing website Mobile Marketer reported that some brands are now finding that more than 30 percent of all searches come from mobile devices. This leaves us in little doubt about the importance of mobile SEO for effective mobile search campaigns, especially in the aftermath of the Google Panda and Penguin Updates. Read on to find out more about 10 sustainable mobile SEO best practices for 2012.

1. 1. Use shorter tail phrases: Mobile SEO requires optimizing for shorter tail queries. This is because searchers using mobile devices enter keyword queries that are local in nature and more prone to rely on Google’s Autocomplete feature.
   2. Do not block your mobile URLs with robots.txt: Mobile SEO experts advise against using mobile URLs with robots.txt. Instead, they advise using canonical tags for duplicate URLs and redirecting of smartphone URLs to smartphone Googlebot. You could also make your mobile homepage appear unique to mobile navigational searches (i.e., brand + “mobile site”).
   3. Make use of social media links: Mobile users, especially smartphone users, are more connected to various social media networks via apps. This requires mobile sites having social media links embedded on every page. Doing so will help your mobile site gain increased exposure, traffic and engagement by ensuring content is easily shared across social networks.

1. Consider using vertical menus: Mobile sites with vertical menus provide an optimal effect for those with touch screen mobile devices. Apart from being user-friendly, it makes it easier to streamline and maneuver the most important pages of a mobile website.
2. Develop your mobile site to scale: While most website owners scale their present sites to fit into a small screen, this can reduce your rankings and usability. Rather than fit to scale, try developing to scale for enhanced user experience and improved rankings.
3. Ensure link location: Ensure that your mobile-friendly page has a clearly marked link to the main desktop site. Apart from ensuring easy access to the full site, it gives users an easy and quick way to switch to the version of the site that best fits their current needs and device.
4. Embed a ‘click-to-call’ feature: Ensure that your mobile-friendly page has a phone number predominately displayed with an easy ‘click-to-call’ feature embedded in every page. This makes it easier for your customers to call directly from your mobile site.
5. Avoid using too much of rich content: Rich content (images and videos) can sometimes take time to load on mobile OS. To avoid this, try using rich content sparingly or reduce file sizes of rich content for quicker loading and better visibility.
6. Make it search engine friendly: Set the user agent to direct search engines’ mobile content crawlers to the same mobile version that users are being sent to. Doing this will not only increase your ranking but also avoid content penalties.
7. Provide full engagement value: Finally, it is good to remember that most mobile users (studies estimate a huge 85%), use mobile devices to “pass time,” “be amused” and for “entertainment reasons.” So make sure that the mobile version of your website provides as much engagement value as possible.