The best Mobile SEO Practices for your mobile site

This article is aimed at discussing the best Mobile SEO Practices for your mobile site. The growth of mobile technology over the past few years has seen more smartphones and tablets released into the market. As a result there is nearly an infinite range of device sizes and capabilities and this make it difficult to handle different websites for different screen sizes.

Mobile SEO is a concept in Search Engine Optimization SEO that involves carefully optimizing your website for the mobile web. A lot of people surf the internet today with mobile devices and it will be unprofessional not to have a mobile-enabled version of your website. Statistics has shown that the percentage of mobile internet users is on the rise every day, so why will you miss out on such opportunity? 

Best Mobile SEO Practices for your mobile site

Mobile SEO simply involves all you need to do to have a mobile friendly version of your website. If you’re trying to attract a mobile audience, then you’d have to be good at it and you’d better give them the best user experience! Considering that smartphones are not built as PCs, you have to properly optimize your mobile site for the convenience of your mobile visitors.

This is where mobile SEO comes in, so whether you are set to build your online presence and is considering the best ways to go about your mobile site or you already have an online presence and already have SEO in place in your existing website, you still have to add mobile SEO to your mobile site. So let’s consider the best mobile SEO practices we must follow to ensure our mobile site is properly optimized for our mobile visitors;

Responsive Design: Build mobile version of your site either with a responsive design or use plugins like MobilePress (if you are a WordPress user) so you don’t have to serve different URLs to different visitors for easy tracking. The SEO benefit of this is that you won’t have to lose any link juice or traffic to several pages, all your backlinks and traffic will be pointed to one URL. With Responsive design you won’t have to design different versions of your mobile site for different devices or screen sizes. This is the first step if you are to get your mobile SEO right.

Create Mobile Sitemap and Submit to Mobile Search Engines: The second thing you have to do is to generate mobile sitemap and submit to mobile search engines.  You have to make your mobile site available and open to search engines scans by mobile search engines. Remember mobile sites are often coded with a different language probably XHTML and maybe interpreted differently by search engines.

That will allow search engines to better serve search requests from mobile devices and lead them to your website pages. If you are a WordPress user you can use XML Sitemap for Mobile plugin to generate an XML Mobile Sitemap for your website.

You can take a look at my mobile sitemap, click to see it. Same goes with image and video, create the sitemaps and submit on your Google webmaster tool for better indexing, remember to submit to Bing webmaster tool too. This is the mistake most webmasters make, they don’t generate and submit their mobile sitemaps, and I hope you don’t make same mistake after reading this post. This is another step you must practice if you are to get your mobile SEO right.

Optimize your mobile site: Another good mobile SEO practice you must ensure is proper optimization of your mobile site. Just as page speed plays an important role in SERP same applies to mobile sites, you don’t want to build a mobile site that will waste your visitor’s time before loading properly, to properly optimize a mobile site for SEO; you must ensure the best search engine optimization practices.

Bear in mind that the processing power and connection speeds of mobile devices and that of PCs are not the same, so you have to keep your mobile site simple so as to quickly load because mobile visitors do not have the patience to wait for a slow loading website, they need to find whatever information they are looking for quickly, you also have to consider that surfing on a mobile device is not as convenient as one may want, so keep your mobile site fast with keyword rich contents.

Social Media Integration: Another thing to consider about mobile SEO is that most mobile visitors are more likely to engage on social media, so ensure to integrate social media buttons to your mobile site and also actively engage such users on the various social media sites like Facebook and Twitter etc.

Avoid Overlays and Popups: One more thing to consider about mobile SEO is overlays and popups. You can use overlays and popups on a desktop site but avoid it entirely on mobile sites as it will end up giving your visitors an ugly user experience.

Conclusion: Considering that most internet users these days surf the web with mobile devices on the go, there is a need for proper mobile SEO of your mobile site. You may have been missing out of this large traffic base because of the poor mobile SEO practices of your mobile site.

Tell me what you think of this article “The best Mobile SEO Practices for your mobile site” on the comment section below; share your views about mobile SEO with me. How have you optimized your mobile site? I will be looking forward to hearing your views. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask, as I will be very happy to answer your questions. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss the ext article.