Web Design and Development with Mobile SEO in Mind
SEO is at the forefront of every web publisher’s mind.
So whether you’re an internet business pining for maximum clicks, or a new blogger luring readers to your corner of the web, it’s a topic that deserves priority consideration when deciding how you’ll approach ‘going mobile.’
Let’s look briefly at the top search engines. These are Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask.com (source). These four are far more popular than other search engines out there so it makes sense to focus your SEO efforts on these major players as they’ll be driving most of your indirect traffic.
The search engines primarily use a three-pronged approach comprised of: a web crawler to follow links and ping millions of sites efficiently; an indexer that, well, indexes their findings in a database; and a query processor to interpret your search terms and provide the best matches from the database.
Beyond traditional mobile web development.
While the SEO world still focuses its efforts on desktop design, the world of mobile design and development has boomed – inevitable considering our smartphone-driven lives. Traditional web development often calls for duplication of web content for desktop and mobile sites. This dual-mode presence calls for time-consuming URL redirects, separation of content, and splitting site traffic, which isn’t good for user experience or that all-important mobile SEO.
Again, we find ourselves landing on responsive web design as the solution (SEO mobile web development is the key!). Keeping your site and content singular is inherent in this web development technique – no URL redirects, no multiple web crawls needed from the search engines, no split traffic hurting your rankings. All this is possible just by choosing a better web design strategy!
There are numerous ways to make your site responsive, including using a responsive framework like Twitter Bootstrap or coding a responsive page template with @mediaqueries. Learn more about responsive design.
For an expanded look at mobile SEO and mobile design/development, reference: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2012/11/seo-for-the-mobile-web/
*Photo courtesy of Fotopedia, used under Creative Commons License.