SEO Consult Blog

The mobile web is still very much in its infancy when compared to the world wide web. However, the increased popularity of mobile devices and the fact that more and more of us are taking up the mobile Internet challenge means that websites created to specifically cater to mobile device users are becoming a more viable challenge. Creating any mobile website offers a variety of challenges, not least of which is how to generate a good level of traffic – mobile SEO is still an underdeveloped area of online marketing but following certain practices can help generate traffic from search engines.

Code Validation

Validate a mobile site’s XHTML code. For the traditional Internet marketer this is sometimes seen as being more of an accessibility or design and development issue but it’s likely that mobile indexing will consider it to be of much greater importance. Use validation tools or, alternatively, ensure that the development company you use guarantees validated XHTML and other code for your website.

General Accessibility

Accessibility may also play a part and is not only important to Mobile SEO but is equally important to your visitors. The mobile web really hasn’t advanced as well as the traditional web yet (and we stress the word yet) and many mobile device manufacturers may offer software and browsers that are less than ideal solutions for reading mobile websites. By ensuring every section of every page is accessible in numerous mobile browsers and with a variety of screen resolutions you can further ensure that mobile spiders and mobile visitors can access your site.

Search Engine Tools For Mobile SEO

The major search engines, that is Google, Yahoo, and MSN, are likely to be equally as successful on the mobile web. Fortunately, they are each dedicated to providing some form of software tools that enable you to better index your own mobile website. The Google Webmaster Mobile Tools and Yahoo’s own software are very similar, in their application, to the main tools they offer Webmasters.

Optimised Pages And Link Profiles

Generally speaking, mobile SEO will be largely similar to standard SEO with regards to the practices of optimising pages and building links. Mobile pages will naturally be shorter and less wordy than your standard web page and this means greater concentration on even more precise keywords. With fewer words to optimise it will be more difficult to include a list of keywords repeated throughout the text while still offering genuinely useful information to visitors.

Image Search Engine Optimisation

Image SEO is also likely to be or greater benefit. As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, which in terms of the mobile web is a lot of content. Optimise images as well as your website content, include keywords in the relevant tags, develop links as you would for any website, and submit your mobile web pages to each of the search engines.

Advancing Techniques

Online marketing, and Search Engine Optimisation in particular, is a constant development of challenges. Just when the SEO community in general feels it has mastered a particular algorithm the search engines change the rules in order to defeat spam and unethical SEO techniques. For a less developed medium like mobile websites this is even more pertinent but by following the same kind of practices you would for a standard SEO campaign you should also be able to generate good search engine traffic for your mobile site.

As many of you are aware XHTML is the replacement for HTML but just what exactly are the differences between the two? and is it really worth the switch over? Let’s find out.

HTML’s specifications where originally created by a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee. Over the years HTML’s codebase became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000) this meant that it was now possible to follow a certain guideline of industry standard coding and rendering HTML, the latter of course has most importance to the browsers.

The differences are very minor, but the results of switching can be worth the effort. The primary benefit is that XHTML is more widely accepted in non “computer” devices like mobile phones, palm devices and other scaled down browsers. This is one of the benefits of XHTML’s portability between devices.

XHTML is also extensible, which basically means that any new tags can be added without a new document type declaration.

What’s the difference between transitional and strict?

In short, transitional is a more forgiving form of doctype as it allows depreciated tags and attributes to pass validation, and the browser will do its best to render the page as you wanted it. You must still have the properly nested lowercase tags to obtain validation though.

The strict doctype is just that, all the depreciated tags and attributes will fail to validate under a strict doctype and may well render incorrectly as well.

So how does this affect me as an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

With the incline of portable devices with internet ready capabilities more users are flocking in their hundreds and thousands to the web be it work, rest or play. Websites now more than ever are under constant scrutiny from these portable devices and in order to capture users from this ever increasing market websites are going to have to be compliant.