How Do You Ensure Your SEO Campaign Stays Upwardly Mobile?
By Harnessing the Power of Mobile Internet in your Strategies
Around three-quarters of the world’s population owns a mobile phone. Nothing startling in that statistic you might think, until you consider the ramifications of this to the SEO industry. A whole new market sector has been slowly developing before our very eyes – one that needs to be addressed by optimisers.
New mobile phone technologies, such as the widespread growth of high-tech models such as the iPhone, have continued to facilitate the growth and importance of making the most of mobile internet in an optimisation campaign.
How Do I Incorporate Key Words?
It is important to note that mobile Google searches are likely to be different to their ‘computer’ counterparts. They require faster, more instantaneous and direct results. Many searches are more task and location-orientated, which means that keyword-rich content is still the order of the day, but in a more compact and concise manner.
The need for geographical key phrasing is also clear. Imagine if you were in a city that you were not familiar with, and wanted some food. Rather than randomly walking around hoping to find somewhere, searching ‘Chinese restaurant in Leicester’ within your phone would be more appropriate. An understanding of this, and the most appropriate keywords searched for, is essential to mobile SEO.
Google have found in research that the average search on their mobile internet search engine is 15 characters long. This may even incorporate ‘text speak’ and abbreviations as befitting of the mobile generation. Perhaps as a result of this, predictive search results have been developed, in-line with the predictive text function of the phone. For instance, the phrase ‘search engine optimisation’ will yield results for the word ‘search’, by attempting to fill in your request with a few automatic selections. Identifying these predictive phrases is essential for SEO providers in placing well in search engines.
How Do I Optimise For Mobiles Then?
As pointed out in one of our previous blogs ‘Website Design For Mobile Devices’, designing takes on a whole new dimension for WAP. This is also the case for SEO. Mobile search engines still recognise optimisation techniques as we know them. Traditional tools still need to be utilised for an effective campaign, such as submitting a mobile sitemap to the search engines, ensuring key content is well placed near the top of web pages and appropriate and mutually beneficial outbound linking.
Submission of domain names to directories and business listings and important SEO concerns such as URLs, page titles and metadata will also still need to be keyword rich to encourage effective indexing and crawling.
A key component of SEO has always been to write for your audience. Be optimisation-friendly, but tailor content and web pages to the requirements of the user. This has never been more true than with mobile search engine optimisation – a rapidly developing industry that is set to grow and grow through 2010 and beyond.
