2010 is the next year that has been talked about year after year as far as mobile online use truly taking off.
The iPhone was indeed revolutionary and provided the true smartphone leap forward, that has been followed and in many ways being surpassed by Android, with more and more mainstream users browsing online via mobile devices.
How does this impact & affect the SEO that you have already carefully crafted for your sites? Not much…for now.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated at the 2010 Mobile World Congress their new mantra & current strategy is “Mobile First” thus you can be first by getting ahead of your competition by planting these mobile seeds into your site:
- Create a mobile version of your site optimally in a mobile subdomain or subdirectory rather than a separate domain or TLD such a .mobi
- Render this mobile version of your site via mobile user agent detection while also providing the user an opt out to the standard web version.
- The mobile version of your site should have the following DocType declared above the HEAD code: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN” “http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd”>
- The SEO coding elements will remain the same in the mobile version but to improve usability & reduce any possible duplicate content issues its best to strip extraneous content, JavaScript & graphics out – optimally via CSS.
- A mobile site should have at least half the load time in comparison to the standard site with a true target of under 2 seconds load time on an Edge or non-3G signal.
- A mobile sitemap XML should also be created which has as the main difference from the standard sitemap XML a <mobile:mobile/> declaration after each URL listing – Google Mobile Sitemap Instructions
- Affirm your mobile progress by using the tools at W3C & MobiReady to validate your code for mobile readiness as well check load time and actual mobile device rendering.
Currently Google Mobile search is nearly identical to the standard search but there is a separate mobile index which will only grow in providing differentiated results.
I will detail in next month’s mobile post at Search Engine Journal a key set of code that will give you this mobile search edge.
