Here are 5 useful tips for Mobile SEO. Number of people accessing the web from mobile is on rise. This means that every serious business should have a mobile website. But with a new medium comes the issue of optimizing this content for search engines. Let’s take a closer look at how you can SEO optimize your mobile website in 5 simple steps.
1. Site indexing
The very first in Mobile SEO is to ensure that Google is able to find you Mobile site. For this you should first try to access your own website from Google on mobile. You should also check Google analytics data and check if your mobile pages are receiving any traffic. If the site is not being crawled by google you should submit mobile sitemap to Google through webmasters tool.
2. User Agent
Some websites allow only mobile phones to access the mobile website. They do this based on user agent. While this is a valid way of ensuring that correct version of the website is shown to mobile users, it completely excludes the search engines. Remember that search engine crawlers are not mobile phones.
They are simple bots that are trying to access your website. To solve this problem, allow user-agent “Googlebot-Mobile” to access mobile website. Not sure how to check user agent of your own browser? Use webdevelopers toolbar.
3. Doc Type Definition
So far you have ensured that Google can access your pages. But does Google recognize that these are mobile website pages? For this Google takes help from Doc Type Definition (DTD). This is declared at the top of the HTML source code of your pages. Ensure that for your mobile websites, these are mentioned as XHTML or Compact HTML.
4. Desktop or Mobile
A user who is trying to access your website from a desktop should be shown the desktop version and the one trying to access it from mobile should be shown the mobile version. But isn’t that obvious. Many webmasters forget this fundamental rule. They create the mobile website but do not redirect the mobile user to mobile website and desktop ones to desktop website. This can be done basis the user-agent. Also don’t forget to do this for all new pages that you keep adding to your website.
5. Link Building
Now nobody wants to build links for the mobile version separately. One easy way to solve this problem is to keep the mobile and desktop URLs the same and redirect based on user-agent. This ensures that all the links that you build will help the desktop as well as the mobile website.