subject: Mobile Seo Tactics With Results [print this page] Mobile SEO is growing at a frenzied speed as over 90% of Americans now have cell phones.This means that any business without a mobile SEO marketing in plan in place is faced with missing a vast group of consumers. As such marketing managers and business owners big and small are making mobile SEO a bigger part of their marketing plan
As more people start using smartphones and using them to search for information, mobile searchers are finding they have different needs and expectations from a mobile site versus a desktop site. Web designers are starting to understand that what works for one does not always work for the other.
As a result, they are developing some best practices to help people find them during a mobile search. Here are a few mobile SEO tactics that a budding mobile webmaster can try.
1. Submit a mobile sitemap to the search engines in order to optimize mobile SEO efforts. Doing this will tell the search engines that the website content will need to show up in mobile searches because it has been optimized for mobile use. Even though a mobile sitemap with smartphone content may not be absolutely necessary, it can be helpful for indexing phone content.
2. For mobile SEO to work, a site needs to be truly mobile; a desktop site is not "good enough." Marketers also need to understand that the people who use mobile searches are very likely to act on what they find online, so making it as easy as possible (i.e. does not take a lot of time or have a lot of useless information) will encourage these users to continue to use that site. For example, give directions to a store or restaurant using the phone's map and GPS capability.
3. When creating mobile websites, images need to be optimized for mobile SEO too. Not only do they need to be smaller, they need to have particular keywords attached them that are more likely to be searched for on a mobile phone. A mobile SEO tactic like this can ensure that the right images -- say the inside of a restaurant -- are found during regular mobile searches.
4. Apps are everywhere and fast becoming part of a mobile SEO plan. However, without a quality mobile site, an app may benefit the app store rather than the website it was supposed to promote. Make sure the website that the app promotes is worthy of visitors and does not frustrate them into never coming back. Better yet, consider using a mobile site to begin with: it is platform agnostic, so it will run on any mobile device. It does not require many different versions for may different phone types.
5. Finally, it is important to re-evaluate the current strategy and tactics on a regular basis. With mobile SEO practices constantly changing and growing, one cannot simply create a mobile marketing plan and let it run on auto-pilot.
