Mobilizing Your Website

Many search engine marketing services are now gearing up to help customers with creating a mobile platform version of their traditional website. I call this “mobilizing” a website. If you are one of those people who plan on using a platform to “mobilize” your website, and still be able to keep good search engines optimization, then there are a few things you need to look out for, as they can have a dramatic effect on mobile SEO.

Most mobile platforms work quite simply. They simply take the existing content from your existing website pages and remove all complex code and media, leaving plain or rich text format text and a minimal number of images. This is basically the same as the “transcoding” that the search engines do. The nice thing is, though, that a proprietary platform it is more customizable.

The first problem with these kinds of software is that if they are web based, they may include the mobile content on a subdomain of their main domain, rather than including it on your domain. This generally looks something like: www.yourwebsite.mywebsite.com. In terms of SEO, that means that you are building up their domain rather than yours, and they have all control of the hosting. Any links, traffic or rankings that your mobile content accumulates are actually accredited to their domain rather than your own. In this case, all your efforts are for naught.

You will also need to be careful with how pages are named on your new platform. The new optimized files may strip away keywords that have been placed there for good SEO on a traditional site. Links that you are using as anchor text can also get messed up. So, having a good SEO firm to help you build this architecture could be a big help. This particular issue could still haunt you, even if you have your true domain name showing for the mobile platform.

When your mobile content is on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory the best bet is to always mirror your traditional site architecture. This lets you take advantage of your previous efforts, including keywords in your file structure. It also makes it much easier for developers to link between the mobile and the traditional content, and to understand what is going on. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel mate.

Again, you will need to submit a mobile site map and link it from your robots.txt file. If you are putting content on a mobile subdomain, you actually need to create a separate robots.txt file and place it and the mobile site map at the root directory of your mobile subdomain. It is fine to also link from the site map in root folder of the primary domain, but it is best to do both. With this strategy your mobile-specific content should be pared-down and optimized enough that it will out-rank the traditional site in searches on less sophisticated phones. In searches on smart phones, your traditional site is more likely to rank, but the browser detection and redirection should ensure that mobile users still get to the correct content. If you use this strategy, you actually provide a good user experience and the best chance of ranking well on the largest number of phones.

If you have any doubts about using a mobile platform for your mobile website version, then you will want to consider using some SEO professional services. A good SEO expert can help you weigh all the decisions, in order to help you be able to take advantage of all the good SEO that has went into your main website.

That’s my take on it, mates.

Johnny Smoes, SEO Experts Australia.com.au.