5 replies to this topic

[sebastienbillard]

I am making some research about SEO for mobile websites. I know SEO is not fondamentally different, though I would like to know what criterias Google Mobile Search use to determine if a website should be shown when using the "Mobile Web (Beta)" option ? I have seen some "wap" sites, but also regular ones. So what is used ? Use of standards (xHTML) ? media handeld stylesheets ? other ?

[rustybrick]

This may help http://www.google.co...c.py?topic=9346

[Nadir]

Salut Sébastien!

I've been doing SEO for mobile sites for almost a year now and here a some advice that I can give you:

*To be included in Google's Mobile Index, your site has to to be mobile friendly. What does that mean? Well, as you've noticed, there are all kinds of markups in this mobile index: WML, XHTML, i-mode (cHTML - c standing for "compact") and even regular HTML.

You'll hear on many articles about mobile SEO that having a 100% valid mobile markup is mandatory. Is that true? Nope. Same BS as what people used to say when SEO started. My sites do not validate against http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ but that never had an impact on my rankings.

But the least you need to have is:

- No tables

- Use concise titles, from what I've seen, Google tend to prefer pages whose title tags only contained the keyword that is searched. Note that Google Mobile will only display the first 65 characters of your title tag.

- Keep your page size low: I tend to limit the average page size of the sites I develop to 10Kb, and it also helps pages load fast on handsets. You'll sometimes see pages on Google's Mobile Index that weight 20Kb, or more.

-Content is key: write, write, and write.


*How will Google Mobile see my site?

To get sites for its mobile index, Google crawls sites by behaving itself as a Nokia 6820, here's the User Agent:

User-agent: Nokia6820/2.0 (4.83) Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)


The Nokia 6820 accept XHTML, so if you serve WML and XHTML markups, Google will index the XHTML version of your sites.

Google Mobile Bot doesn"t crawl mobile sites as frequently as the desktop version. On my sites, crawl happen every 2 weeks, and last for 2 or 3 days.

*Create a mobile sitemap: See here http://www.google.co...amp;ctx=sibling

Sitemaps really help on any mobile SEO strategy. I use GsiteCrawler to create them and a script to update them automatically.

*Links:

Yep, links are important too in the mobile web. But you don't need that many links as on the desktop web, since the mobile web is not as competitive.


Hope that helps,
Nadir

[sebastienbillard]

Thanks, that's great information !

[A.N.Onym]

Nadir, is it safe to use a *mobile* stylesheet or some mobile SEs and phones don't accept it? Surely developing a new version of a site isn't very efficient.

[Nadir]

Hi Yuri, yes you can use CSS on your mobile sites. Phones with WML browsers won't support CSS, but most of the recent phones, which have an XHTML browser will.