With an increasing number of people using their smartphones to access the internet and browse the web it is of utmost importance for website developers to have SEO-friendly mobile websites. For people to be able to successfully locate your business through mobile search engines you need to have good SEO specifically tailored for a mobile website.
The very first challenge is of course having a mobile website in the first place. Difficult and time-consuming it may be to have a website other than your regular one, it is sure to pay off. And in addition to having a mobile website you also have to make sure it has SEO so that it crops up high on search engines and people are able to find it and whatever product or service you are offering.
The very domain name of your mobile website can have a huge impact on your SEO. There are a number of possibilities when it comes to choosing the domain name for your mobile website. You have the option of going for a whole new domain like www.yoursite.mobi and creating a mobile website on it. But the better options are to either have a subdomain or a subdirectory of your regular online website. Out of all these options, you can have the best SEO if you create a subdirectory of your regular site. This means that you continue using your current domain but also incorporate an auto redirect that would forward mobile users to your website’s subdirectory which is your mobile website, www.yourdomain.com/mobile/. Naming the subdirectory /mobile/ is the most popular choice.
By making a subdirectory you utilize on the existing page rankings of your site, something you can’t do if you have an all new domain name or even if you have a subdomain like http://m.yourdomain.com. You can take advantage of your regular website’s index page history and all the link juice and thus, get a head start for your mobile website. This way all the work you have put in on your regular website proves to be fruitful for the mobile one.
The Google mobile search engine is undoubtedly the most popular and widely used mobile search browser. Whether people use Android, Apple or Blackberry smartphones, Google is still their choice of search engine. You may have an efficient search engine optimized regular online site that has high page rankings but Google mobile search won’t rank it high on smartphone searches. Although Google mobile search lists all websites it definitely gives preference to the mobile-optimized ones. So a mobile website that is optimized for smartphone users would surely rank high on search engine result pages thus leading to an increase in the number of visitors.
According to calculations made by Comscore, out of all the mobile search browsers, Google Mobile has 2.2 billion searches. Yahoo and Bing have 0.55 billion and 0.5 billion searches respectively. It is expected that by the year 2015 the number of mobile users will far exceed PC users. Thus, the time is ripe to not only have a mobile website but also to make it SEO-friendly for users to be able to find your business. Your product or service has to be made available to an increasingly mobile audience and without a good SEO you risk losing out on valuable market share.
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