Search Engine Optimization

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What is mobile Search Engine Optimization ( mobile SEO )? It's how to design and code your site to get found in mobile search engines.

Contents

[edit] Original Sources

Barbara Ballard originally wrote this, with input from:

[edit] Getting Found by Mobile Search Engines

Web crawlers need to find your mobile content, including your mobile site. Options are:

  • a top level domain (TLD) explicitly for mobile, specifically, .mobi
  • content adaptation and only one site
  • a subdomain (mobile.domain.com or m.domain.com) or subsection (www.domain.com/mobile) *with link from the main site"
  • a mobile sitemap - this needs further analysis. Would providing links to both the mobile and desktop equivalents work?
  • meta.txt

A new .mobi domain ensures a separate entry for your mobile site and tells the crawler that it is mobile, so when the user clicks the link it will render mobile and not transcoded. Some engines have mobile-optimized sites listed preferentially, so there is some benefit there (until you have a lot of mobile competition).

Content adaptation will get your mobile site found and preserve desktop SEO. But the search engine won't know it's mobile, and your site may get transcoded by Google for a much worse user experience.

A subdomain works well and preserves your desktop SEO history, but only if the crawler can find it. Thus the main site must have a link to the mobile site or the mobile site must be discovered in some other way (i.e. mobile sitemap, meta.txt, links from web or mobile web pages).

[edit] On-page SEO Practices

Many signals in mobile SEO are similar to desktop SEO, but certain engines use mobile specific signals to promote mobile content. Mobile search results can vary from desktop results because mobile search engines are trying to serve relevant results in context, often more so than on the desktop Web. There are also traditional SEO best practices that seem to be violated more in mobile SEO, such as inclusion of session ids, lack of text-based content, and a lack of linking to relevant content. In addition, studies have shown that mobile search behavior differs from desktop search behavior, making keyword research for mobile users important for mobile traffic above and beyond traditional keyword research.

Some best practices:

  • Short, keyword-rich title tags containing mobile specific keywords
  • Text-based content or accessible text equivalent
  • Pages 20k or less
  • Links to mobile content
  • Include the word "mobile" somewhere on the page
  • Include the phone number in the meta description or in the body of the page
  • Consider the mobile user experience and create content that a mobile user would appreciate and promote
  • Mobile keyword research with Google's Mobile Keyword Tool
  • semantic markup
  • include your address, if relevant. This will improve performance for local searches.
  • use well-formed code

There is evidence that some crawlers will crawl each version of a device-adapted page.

[edit] Pagination

When you have multiple-pages targeting the same keywords on a domain, which of the following is the best way to avoid keyword cannibalization?

Add a meta robots tag with "noindex, follow" to paginated pages.

Place links on all the secondary pages back to the page you most want ranking for the term/phrase using the primary keywords as the anchor text of those links.

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