Mobile Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As
the number of people using the mobile Internet increases, the amount
of mobile content is growing as well. As a result, there is a
greater need than ever to make mobile content and services easier to
find, both to enhance the user experience and ultimately to maximize
revenue opportunities. And that's where mobile SEO comes in.
Mobile SEO is a hybrid of Search Engine Optimization and of Mobile Marketing and a very specific niche of both. According to Wikipedia, "search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via 'natural' ('organic' or 'algorithmic') search results."
However, the meaning of mobile SEO can change depending upon where the "mobile" is placed in the definition, so it's important to emphasize that the focus here is on mobile searches, as opposed to mobile search engines or mobile content.
In the history of mobile search engine optimization, many have understood the process as "improving the volume and quality of traffic from mobile search engines" or "improving the volume and quality of traffic to mobile web pages". However, given that many Smartphone-equipped mobile users are able to access many types of content through their phones, including desktop pages, smartphone pages, and mobile applications, many popular search engines have begun indexing more than just mobile web pages.
A forward-thinking definition of mobile SEO must recognize this fact, and broaden the focus to mobile users. This type of optimization will focus on indexing any type of content that is relevant to a mobile user (including mobile web pages, mobile applications, desktop web pages, images, feeds, etc.) and optimizing it for mobile searches.
Unlike previous types of SEO, mobile SEO is not inherently about optimizing for a specialized type of content through vertical search engines. Instead, mobile SEO is focused on an entirely different "mode" of search, or with the context in which the queries are entered. As mobile search is often contrasted with desktop search in academic research, so mobile SEO is contrasted with desktop SEO.
There are types of vertical search engines that index mobile content such as ringtones and wallpapers, and optimizing for these search engines is often called mobile SEO. However, since this is only one aspect of mobile search, it is only one aspect of mobile SEO. Mobile SEO could also include optimizing different media types in so far as they are relevant to a user's mobile context.
Why is Mobile SEO Important?
Do you remember the good old
days when you could easily
rank at the top of the
search engines by simply
putting up a website with a
little bit of search engine
optimization? Maybe you do
or maybe you were not around
on the internet then. Back
in the late 1990´s and early
2000´s it was still easy to
rank for almost every
keyword you wanted to rank
for. Nowadays most lucrative
keywords have very high
competition levels and will
take you a lot of effort and
money to get top search
engine rankings for them.
Having a mobile website with Mobile SEO is almost like going back a decade. Most of your competitors do not have a mobile website yet and when they have a mobile site, most likely it is not fully optimized. So if you want to get top positions for keywords for your mobile website than you should focus on mobile SEO now.
For normal websites you can do a lot on your pages to optimize your website. Unfortunately mobile devices have a much smaller screen, so your mobile website is also much smaller. This leaves less room to optimize the text on your pages, because there will not be much text on the mobile version of your website. So if you want top rankings for your mobile website it is extremely important to optimize every aspect you can. That is what we exactly do in terms of Mobile Website Optimization or Mobile SEO.