How To Maximize Your Mobile Website By Using Mobile SEO Tactics

So you know it’s going to be the next step in SEO evolution. Once you design, create and upload your Mobile Website for public consumption, properly optimizing the site for SEO purposes is bound to arise.

You know all the marketing gurus and their gerbils are rapidly spinning on their treadmills and pumping away since the industry has been quiet lately. They’re obviously working behind the scenes feverishly developing anything that’s mobile marketing related.

So how different is regular conventional SEO promotional practices for traditional websites differ from the much smaller and compact mobile sites. Listed are some tips which will hopefully help in your mobile website SEO efforts, so you can soar to the top of the mobile Search Engines.

Mobile Website SiteMap
The first and perhaps the most important step is creating a Site Map for your mobile site. The following XML code was directly pulled from Google’s Webmaster Central. Google also recommends that you should at this time be avoiding the majority of the mobile specific Sitemap Creation tools which are available.

NOTE: Remove all the “*”
<*?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<*urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
<*url>
<*loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html
<*mobile:mobile/>
<*/url>
<*/urlset>

It’s critical for your mobile sites welfare that you don’t omit the <*mobile:mobile/> tag, otherwise, your site won’t be properly crawled.

Each mobile Site Map that you create needs to have a name which is unique, but, URLs which are serving multiple markup languages can be listed by using just a single Site Map.

If you’re using Google’s Sitemap Generator to create your mobile Site Map, Google cautions that you’ll also need to create a separate config file for each Mobile Site Map as well. Go to Google Webmasters Central for specific instructions.

Submitting To Google Webmasters
Make sure that you submit your new and freshly optimized mobile site to Google webmasters, just the same way that you would with a regular website Site Map.

Not Using Long Description Titles
It’s recommended that you don’t use long description titles such as, “The Top 22 Tips And Tricks For Training As Well As Turning Your Pug Into A Money Making Machine While Losing Weight” is obviously not a great title for your mobile site. Think more in terms of using short blog like post headlines instead. Keep it concise and as simple as possible.

If You Have A Mobile Blog
If you operate a mobile blog, and if you’ve set it up properly with all of the proper plug-ins, mobile SEO shouldn’t be much of a problem. But keep in mind that if you don’t bother submitting your blogs or website to all the mobile directories, you will remain anonymous and invisible. All of the SEO tactics that you’ve performed will not be able to help you, you just simply won’t exist!

One excellent way is to track a site called SEOPrinciple.com, which actively reports on all the latest and greatest SEO mobile related news and issues from Google and beyond. Google’s Webspam guru, specifically Matt Cutts provides some of the news. You can also go to YouTube to listen and learn on Google’s Webmaster Central channel for visual SEO news.

Matt Cutts is known for providing the latest facts as well as figures such as he recently reporting that there’s now more than 4 billion mobile devices which are currently Internet active world-wide, compared to only around 1 billion PC’s. So the world according to Cutts, Google is planning a massive expansion in it’s Search features and “mobile” is expected to be a huge part of it. So it’s advised that you get on-board relatively on the ground floor.

Driving Mobile Traffic Using YouTube
One excellent way of driving traffic directly to your mobile site is with the usage of YouTube videos. You should also be using the URL address of your mobile site as well as displaying a prominent “call to action” in the videos.

If you go to Google’s mobile web index, you’ll notice that the majority of the top results are… you guessed it, YouTube pages. Although this isn’t a surefire, long term SEO strategy that will last, but it’s working awfully fine right now!

Using Mobile Best Practices
Make sure that you check out and refer to the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices, which can be found at www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/#d0e1099. There, you can find an abundance of immediately useful and helpful data, including tips such as “keeping all your pages under 21k” etc.

Say Hello To Mr Googlebot-Mobile
You need to meet Googlebot-Mobile, this is your next best friend and an extremely special bot who’s strict intent is to constantly look for “mobilefriendly” websites. And once it does, this bot will include them in Google’s mobile web index.

It’s been reported this particular bot does an excellent job in crawling for mobile sites, but the majority of mobile site owners however are not yet bothering to comply with the all important mobile Site Map protocols.

Googlebot-Mobile is also reportedly a little slower than the other search engine bots in indexing, currently taking up to 2 weeks for it to complete a “rotation.”

When all is finally said and done however, mobile SEO is still taking baby steps and dealing with teething pains. So by all means, make sure that you take all the steps and tips which are listed. But like anything else website related, you’ll need to make your blog or mobile content page as useful, content rich and relevant as possible. This step will always remain the same.