SEO for Mobile Site

SEO for Your Mobile Sites

As the world moves towards mobility optimizing your website for desktop search engines is no more sufficient. Note mobile search engines are different from desktop search engines hence the search results will be much different in your smart phones than what you see in your personal computers. If you are new to mobility here are the basics steps what you need:

• How to Create a Mobile Site?
• How does a desktop site converted to a Mobile Site?
• What are the Mobile Site Builders available?
• How to monetize a Mobile Site?
• How to create a Mobile App for my site?
• What are the Mobile App Builders available? And Finally:
• How to optimize a mobile site for search engines? – Which we will discuss in this article.

Indexing Your Mobile Site in Search Engines

Once you setup a redirect in your desktop site to guide the users to your mobile site when viewed from mobile devices, the next important thing you need to do is to check whether your site is indexed in mobile search engines or not. Use “site:yoursitename” in any mobile device and make sure your all your site’s pages are indexed in the search engines. If your site is not indexed then probably your site may have one of the below issues:

• Mobile Crawlers not finding your site:

Search engine’s mobile crawlers need to crawl your site before index your pages in the search data base. If your site is new then you can use your webmaster tools account to check the issues in crawling your mobile site. Here is the way to check your Mobile Sitemap and Robots.txt file is accessible by crawlers or not. Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and go to Health>Blocked URLs. As shown in the picture enter your site’s URL, select the Googlebot-mobile and then press on the “Test” button. 

Sitemap and Robots.txt Analysis For Your Mobile Site

The result will show you whether valid sitemap is detected by Google and what are the pages blocked by your robots.txt file.

• Submit Your Mobile Sitemap:

Create your mobile sitemap and submit to search engines using webmaster tools account. This will help the mobile-bots to understand your mobile content and crawl easily.

• Access issue for mobile-bots:

Your mobile site may stop the bots accessing your pages due to the reason that the mobile user-agent is not included in your site. Make sure your site is included with the mobile user agents (Googlebot-Mobile for Google) so that the mobile-bots are allowed to access your pages without any issues.

Make sure your mobile URLs are identifiable

After mobile-bots crawled your pages the next step is that mobile-bots verify your URLs are compatible with mobile devices. If your URLs are not compatible then search engines will ignore them without indexing. The important criteria for URL validation is the declaration of Document Type Definition (DTD) in your mobile site. Ensure DTD declaration in your site is using correct mobile setup like XHTML or cHTML.

Document Type Definition for Your Mobile Site

Setup Your Mobile Redirect properly

Once you are ready with a mobile site the important point is to setup a redirect in your desktop site. This redirect will guide the users to take to your mobile site when viewed from a mobile device as well as inform the search engines the corresponding mobile URLs of your desktop pages. Two more additional points are to be considered here when guiding your mobile users:

1. Ensure your pages are equivalently matched in both desktop and mobile version. For example redirecting one of your desktop page contains particular product information to a home page of your mobile site is considered by the search engines as against the mobile webmaster guidelines.
2. Provide your desktop site’s URL in mobile site and vice versa to ensure the navigation of one site to another. This is especially useful when your mobile site does provide all the information from your desktop site due to the size.

Same URL for desktop and Mobile Site

Some of the hosting services offer same URL for your desktop as well as mobile site. (For example – Weebly offers same URL as of now). In this case switching between mobile and desktop are controlled by the user-agent. Check your site in various mobile devices to make sure the design is working in all the devices otherwise you may need to choose appropriate mobile site builders like Dudamobile.

Cloaking

Cloaking is to show different content to search engine bots and the users in order to increase site ranking in the search.  Cloaking is considered as a severe violation from webmaster’s guidelines by the search engines and as a result your site will disappear from the search results. So whether you are using same URL or different URLs for mobile and desktop sites make sure the redirects are appropriately set and the pages are showing relevant content. 

It is absolutely fine to have different content in your mobile and desktop sites due to various reasons but the redirects should lead the users and the search engine bots to appropriate pages.

Dos and Don'ts with Your Mobile Site

Dos Design your mobile content effectively to help the search engines and users to navigate easily. Setup and test your redirects in various mobile devices. Submit mobile sitemap in your webmaster tools account. Make sure mobile URLs are accessible by mobile-bots. Use correct DTD.

Don'ts Avoid cloaking. Congested mobile site stuffed with content.

Content By webnots.com