Mobile SEO: Making Sites Short and Social

With all good search methods starting to fade away like a morning fog, we are getting ready to enter an era of a deeper focus on the mobile computing world, optimizing our sales and marketing efforts to cater to the new smaller, more ‘on the go’ lifestyles that people lead.  Whereas before, most professional marketing companies and individuals would create unique banner advertisements and vie for placement on top ranking companies sites, those old school days of fetching banner impressions in hopes for site recognition are long over.

Today, the race is on to develop a strong mobile presence for those who own tablets and high-end android devices.  This, my friends, has imminently opened up the mobile SEO race, and the field is currently wide open even as 2014 is nearly three quarters complete.

Stepping Outside ‘The Norm’

Normal search engine optimization is a mere concentration on the organic placement, and even paid placement, of well-scripted advertisements to lure prospective customers to your website.  With Hummingbird inducing a major body slam to websites that poorly executed their SEO efforts, professionals have not only re-evaluated the content for their websites, but are realizing that a huge portion of the world now owns some sort of a cellular device or tablet – and turns to social media for everything while on them.

With this wave of mobility in the phone and tablet market, business owners and web entrepreneurs are now scrambling to make their own applications for iPhones and Androids, while also making their advertisements available across the mobile networks; although currently expensive, it is well worth most companies paying the extra price for an increase in mobile exposure.

A solid mixture of mobile SEO, added to an already well-optimized web presence, is what the deciding factor will be in whom ultimately gets placed higher in the mobile search queries, including Google, once the bots have begun to index mobile pages.

Prepping for Mobile Optimization

In preparation for this new schema of optimization, there are a few benchmarks for powerful marketing campaigns that you should follow during your mobile optimization efforts.  First, it would be a great idea to adjust your organic or paid search placements to a shorter, more informative title and description.  Obviously, mobile content is going to be smaller; therefore, getting the message across in the smallest space possible is key in order to avoid people struggling to read the entire search ad; in other words.  keep what you need to say short and sweet.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure that your mobile-friendly website has a mobile sitemap.  In this you will not only have greater visibility on the mobile search market, but search indexing will be easier as there will be separation between desktop content and mobile content.

Finally, another small preparation that can be made to better increase mobile presence is simply to shorten content into one row for better mobile content visibility.  If you have a mobile device now, go to Walmart.com and see how they have all of their links and content fitting in one row so all you need to do is scroll down, not side to side or magnify the pages at all.

Adopt smaller, informative links and shortened content on your mobile landing page to capture the main ideas easily, and if you have larger files that are irrelevant to sales or services, then leave those for the desktop users. Finally, understand that mobile keywords need to be short and sweet, considering that people on the go do not want to type ‘long-tail’ keywords in a small box.

Moreover, make sure to  optimize mobile content with smaller, equally descriptive keywords that will save time for the searching persons and keep your sites on the front page of the engines.  Taking these small tips with you can prepare you for the mobile gold rush that will soon be unfolding as the year turns over.

The Takeaway

Mobility of websites and content can only get better as time evolves; as you have seen just over the last 30 years, computing has shrunk considerably from the Apple II’s and the Commodore 64 era, and it will only continue to get smaller each year.  Whether this will allow business websites to burgeon, or flop, is yet to be discovered.

While concentrating on the organic placements of your content, it would behoove you to expound both time and resources making your content, sitemaps and keywords mobile-ready simply because that is where our search engine society has landed, and ultimately will continue to go through the next millennium.