Mobile evangelist and author Cindy Krum gives great tips on mobile SEO and Mobile marketing in this interview. Cindy Krum talks about how to create your websites that can be found on search engines through a mobile phone.
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Bob Tripathi: "How" which is very important. There's a certain aspect of mobile which is the mobile SEO. For example, you've created all the sites for the desktop; it looks great and all that, but then how do you optimize for mobile, and what are some of the steps that you take?
Cindy Krum: The main thing for mobile SEO is to integrate with your existing rankings and what you've already been working on, and then leverage that for mobile. The key thing there is don't go and create a second mobile site, or don't go and use a hosted mobile solution that's not on your primary domain. Take what you've built up with your primary domain, and then leverage that by either using your existing pages and making those look okay on a mobile phone, or creating separate mobile pages.
Bob Tripathi: With mobile there would be a new set of challenges, I would think, as you start doing the mobile SEO just like how we did for desktop sites. One of them would be usability, right? What's your take on it and what do you usually do?
Cindy Krum: There are a couple of different ways to organize the usability that happens when you click from a search result to the site. Actually what we're seeing a lot is that traditional websites are ranking in mobile search even if you have a mobile site, because those traditional sites have better links, and more history: all the good things that make a page rank. the mobile sites don't have any of that, so algorithmically the traditional pages will still outrank the mobile pages.
Sometimes it happens the other way where mobile pages will get next in rank in traditional pages, and you have to combat that. That's the biggest usability thing because if you're sending a mobile to your traditional page, that can be a bad experience if you haven't planned for it.
To plan for it, there are a couple of things you can do. You can start by making your existing page work better on a mobile phone using separate external style sheets. So you have one style sheet for instructions on how it'll render on a computer, and then another style sheet for the same page to tell it how to render when it's on a mobile phone. Then when you're on a mobile phone, it'll automatically pull the mobile style sheet, and when you're on a traditional computer it'll automatically pull the traditional style sheet. That's really great for SEO, because you get to really leverage your existing pages and everything you've got going on. It's the same page, just reordered.
When you do that though, something that can happen if you have a lot of java script navigation at the top, is if you're looking at a site like that on a feature phone, everything will be stacked. So if you have columns, your right column (if there's something important at the top of your right column that you need people to see) will get stacked after your left column and your centre column. So the stuff that's important at the top is actually pushed down. You use that style sheet to reorganize things and have them show in the right order when they're stacked. The other thing you can do that I suggest, is using jump links at the top of your mobile rendering and then pushing your main navigation to the bottom of the mobile rendering. So the jump links will say something like "go to the main content," "go to the main navigation", "go to today's news" or whatever. So it's a shortened version of your main navigation that keeps them from having to scroll and find it, it'll jump it directly there. You include that in the base code and you "display:none" it when it's on a traditional site, then you let it display when it's on the mobile site.
Bob Tripathi: I think as a site developer you need to still pay attention to the mobile site and not just pray and hope that it's going to look alright on a mobile phone.
Cindy Krum: And it'll look different on different phones, so you have to test and say "okay, the style sheet looks okay here, but we have to tweak it for this phone". In some cases you can even create more than one mobile style sheet for different rendering situations.
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