Posts Tagged ‘mobile browsing’

The internet has revolutionised the way the world works, the way it lives, the way it loves, but the internet is not the only thing changing lives. Technology is becoming increasingly accommodating in our hectic lives and one of the ways it does so is through mobile phones. In the last 20 or so years, mobile phones have progressed.

They have gone from brick-like devices with mile long aerials to slim, trendy little gadgets that sport a myriad of functions. One of the most useful functions a mobile phone offers any user today is internet connectivity. It is just one more way in which the internet is becoming a more integral part of our lives. It is also just one more way in which technology is becoming more accommodating of modern living. However, what does this new mobile online revolution mean to your business website?

Changing with the tides

Changes in the internet and in technology are about as frequent as changes in the oceanic tides, if not more so. For this reason it is important for all businesses to be clued up about the changes that are forever going on in the worlds of the internet and technology. Why should it bother you if the internet changes or personal technology changes? After all, you have a well-established website.

Well, changes affect you and your website. They affect how people search, what they connect to the internet and search with and how well they react to you. For instance, one major problem that faces mobile internet users is the heavy websites on the internet; those using lots of graphics, flash animation and more. These websites either take forever to load or they don’t load at all. In order to appeal to your mobile visitors, you need to cater to their needs and that means catering to the online capabilities of mobile phones.

Mobiles are moving up

More and more people are using their mobiles for internet connectivity today. Studies have shown that connecting to the internet from a mobile phone has gone from an occasional occurrence to a daily one. About 35% of all mobile users connect to the internet through their mobiles daily. This is a significant increase and trend that deserves your attention.

Mobile optimization pointers

SEO experts will be able to advise you about creating pages dedicated to mobile internet users, generating mobile access pages while using the very same URLs or creating a whole new sub-domain for mobile users. Each has both perks and drawbacks. You will also need to look at changing the type of content aimed at mobile users.

They do not want flash animation, elaborate imaging and other fancy frills and spills. They want content that is short, concise and to the point. They want the information immediately, so offer the bare minimum and essentials, forget about vision statements, company history and other extras. Your mobile users need to be catered to in a completely different way to the normal computer users. You need to take the limitations of mobile phones into consideration and work on ways to present them with what they want that work around those limitations.

If your site needs to be accessible to mobile browsers, you have got some planning to do. With the advent of the smartphone, an increasing number of people are using mobile phones to browse the net. Your site needs to look its best.

Not every business needs to be ready for mobile browsing just yet. Mobile browsing is for specific information that doesn’t, as yet, cover the whole web. However, not every business may be aware of the behaviour profile of their target users as it applies to mobile browsing. For example, if your business provides financial services, you may feel that your target users browse for you when at the office or at home. If your site provides to-the-minute market information, however, users may rely on constant updates to make their financial plans. It’s important to research this aspect of your target market carefully to ensure you’re in the right position.

If you do decide to prepare for mobile browsing, there are a series of decisions you need to make.

• Alter your existing site, or build a new mobile-friendly one? This is the decision from which the other decisions branch off. It is not always necessary to build a separate mobile-friendly site, but if you have to make too many adjustments to your current site, it may be worth it. Many businesses host mobile-friendly sites on a sub domain of their existing site and notify the mobile search engines and browsers of their existence. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about the processes of mobile browsing
• Build for specific mobile technologies, or keep things general. The discrepancies between phones produced two years ago and phones produced two months ago are huge. If you design a site for a modern phone, you can make use of more advanced technologies, but you might not display on some phones. At the moment, it’s very difficult to please everyone

Mobile browsing has been limited in the past by the need for WAP coding, which not every business could be bothered with. Today, many mobile browsers render HTML and its relatives. Coding your mobile site in HTML, however, could mean you won’t appear on older mobile phones. Similarly, the more modern the mobile browser is, the more likely it is to properly display JavaScript and the mobile versions of Flash.

If your target users predominantly use the latest phones, then it’s possible you don’t have to worry about what parts of your site will display. You may decide that the risk of some of your users not being able to see your content isn’t worth it. You may take the most complicated, but best, option of coding everything so that mobile browsers are identified and responded to automatically.

• Research for mobile SEO, or keep applying your existing methods. This isn’t really a choice. The mobile search engines operate in slightly different ways to traditional search engines. There are also more of them to take into consideration and the players are changing all the time. Separate search engine optimisation will be necessary for your mobile site