Mobile SEO is the growing trend as each day passes. This is because more and more users now access most websites via their mobile phones, since desktop PCs (or laptops) are bulky and one cannot take the computer screen literally everywhere. The basic principle of the Search Engine Optimization remains the same, no matter which device you choose. But there are still some factors that need to be kept in mind while designing your website for the mobile SEO.
The mobile phone is different. It has small screen size and memory limitations. No matter how much the processor, cache, RAM, hard disk, etc. of a cellphone are modified with time, it is still behind the desktop computer. The Google page where all the searches are loaded in a mobile phone do not show 10 results like in desktop computers but just top 5 results. The mobile users do not scan the page but always tend to scroll from top to bottom and so they are easily get distracted to some different web-page if they do not find worth going through. Also they type least characters on the search bar, about 2 or 3 words at the most, not the whole statement of 5 to 7 words. This is because of the difference in the screen sizes and keyboards, where a user can physically type a whole sentence in a desktop keyboard but in case of a small virtual keyboard the user tends to mistype. The keyword selection has to be selected based on this very fact.
We also suggest you to never forget optimizing the images that you have uploaded on the website. Gone are those days in which the images were simply blocked for mobile users just because those images were too bulky to handle. Images do play an important role in search engine optimization because these contain Alt tags. Most modern search engines haven’t yet learned reading the image files as well as the videos. So, what we do is add the Alt tags so that if the images aren’t loaded the Alt text shows up, which is considered as relevant for the SEO as well, both for mobile and desktop PC.
There is a separate search engine for mobile as well that crawls for each site and looks for the best, most convenient, fast and easiest websites that do not have much of the hyperlinks attached everywhere. The keywords and meta-description should be short and to-the-point so that Google bot ranks it well and relevant results come onto the surface.
It is recommended to always have a responsive website of your own so that whoever visits your page could see through it without any interruption. But this isn’t always the friendly criterion because many websites are perfect to get loaded in a desktop computer but are quite bulky for a cellphone, and it is not a new thing for mobile users to face difficulty opening the website. The result? They will definitely lose interest and move on and wouldn’t recommend that particular website to others as well, which isn’t a healthy sign for a business. Gradually the site will rank downwards. Those sites are preferable by Google which rank higher in desktop, mobile phone as well as on tablets. In a responsive web design, the size of the screen is dynamically adjusted (through CSS) so that whenever a user uses a particular device, the size adjusts accordingly (like a dynamic fluid), that’s how the programming is done. The responsive sites have just one URL, whether you open it through the computer screen or your mobile screen.
There are two other methods as well (other than the Responsive ones) in which the URL could be set for cellphone users. These are – Dynamic serving and Parallel URL. The Dynamic serving is specifically designed for mobile users and computer users both but despite of having a common URL the user experience still varies as per the device being used. This means that there would be separate user programs being developed in each case. The program eliminates whatever isn’t right for the mobile phone user, say an image that requires lots of memory, or anything else. This option is best for those who, for instance, are searching for some nearby places like restaurants, hotels, etc. This is because it is the mobile device that users have at that particular moment.
The Parallel URL have separate URL for each device. For example, m.facebook.com is basically for those who login through their mobile phone in Facebook’s site, which is quite different from facebook.com for desktop users. There is also a misconception that keeping different URLs in each case and having the exact content is penalized by the search engines, which is not true. The search engine ‘knows’ that those contents are modified and adjusted as per the device being used. The detail is mentioned in the coding which wouldn’t be understood in layman terms.