Tech Lover 9

With the exponential increase of mobile-web-surfers, mobile SEO has taken the center stage in SEO world. Companies are optimizing their inventories for mobile search engines to capture leads from growing number of mobile users.

Quick facts about mobile users: 89% of young people, aged 18 – 24 yrs spend between 1-5 hours/day on their mobile. 18% of them prefer to purchase products and services from their mobile phones, rather than visiting shops or shopping on their PCs. Nearly 1 in 3 young person would like brands to send them promotions through their mobile.

Today, mobile phone usage and mobile web surfing has much deeper penetration even in the villages of developing countries like India and China. Improved mobile-web-user interfaces on smartphones are the big boost in the growth of mobile search.

iPhone users conduct 50 times more searches on Google than its nearest rival Yahoo!. And, the credit goes to easy accessibility and ease of use of Google search, and with the Google mobile application you can even search with your voice.

How mobile SEO works?

Google mobile deputes a different kind of spider than Google bot for spidering, with the user agent string “ Googlebot-Mobile ”. The mobile search engine ranking algorithms of Google are altogether different. When a Googlebot-Mobile crawls your site, it sends an HTTP Accept request header to your web server and inform that, it wants to receive the mobile version of that page. For that, your web server should be properly configured and your website or blog should be responsive enough to render a mobile version of the website without redirecting to a mobile-specific URL.

You can offer a mobile specific URL also for your blog or website for marketing or promotional purposes. Few well known examples of such URLs are http://m.facebook.com, http://en.m.wikipedia.org etc. Here the big advantage is the smaller file size, which loads faster.

6 Mobile SEO Tips for Higher SE Ranking

1. Small and fast-loading site
2. XHTML Mobile 1.0 DOCTYPE
3. UTF-8 character encoding
4. JPEG/GIF/PNG images
5. On-site SEO as usual
6. Use of a mobile sitemap
Apart from the above 6 factors, you have to follow the normal rules of SEO as usual, while optimizing your site for mobile search.