If you want to be an effective marketer these days, you have to embrace the trend that customers are going mobile. They use their mobile devices to shop, chat, look up information, and anything else you can think of that they used to do on their computers. Because of this trend, you need to make sure that your website is not only mobile-friendly, but that it is optimized for search engines as well. If you want some guidance in how to achieve that, read over this article for advice on optimizing your mobile website.
Tips For Optimizing Your Mobile Website
The mobile version of your website is really just a simplified version of your full website, without a lot of images and non-text elements that are on your full site. Optimization strategies are similar. You want to use your keywords in your meta title tags and your meta description tags. Keep your navigation simple, and use keywords in the URLs as well.
Just like how you would on your full website, the most important, key content should be near the top of your mobile page. This has a couple of benefits. First, when your mobile visitor lands on your page, he will immediately see the important pieces of content first. Then, when the search engine crawler crawls through your mobile site, the keywords will be indexed right away. You would not want to bury your important content at the bottom of the page because your mobile visitor may not scroll down that far to get to it.
You should submit your mobile website URLs to mobile directories. Although eventually, the search engine crawlers will crawl over page on the World Wide Web. However, if you submit them to the directories, it may get your pages indexed more quickly.
Keep in mind that are many models of mobile devices operating on many platforms. Just like you should always check your full website on various browsers, you should check your mobile website on various mobile device emulators. These emulators can usually be found on the websites of the mobile device manufacturers. You will need to download and install the emulator on your computer. This is the only way you can preview your mobile site on a hand-held device if you do not have access to the actual equipment.
Mobile Website and Tables
Tables are never good for optimization purposes. Tables are really only meant for displaying tabulated data and should not be used to format columns on a page. When crawlers encounter text in a table, they may not index the page content in the order that you may expect, because the crawlers will go from one table cell to another, from left to right, then row by row. If you had relied on tables to give you columns, your text content may be crawled out of order. For page formatting, use only cascading stylesheets, or CSS. This gives a clean copy for the crawlers to go over, without the style information cluttering the field.
You cannot overlook your mobile audience if you want to say competitive. Use the tips in this article, and make sure that your mobile website is optimized properly.