Mobile SEO: Optimizing for Mobile Devices

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I am trying to optimize one of my client's site for Mobile devices. Let me know what are the steps and differnces in optimizations when compared to normal optimization.

Thanks in Advance.

[tedster]

As I understand it, the main step is to create a Mobile Sitemap [google.com]. This will help your mobile site get into Google's Mobile Search and help to avoid any near-duplicate issues with your regular pages.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

We have already created a new WAP enabled site as well as submitted a Mobile Sitemap.

I would like to know specifically about the onpage and offpage that is reqquired for a mobile site. Are there any special Meta tags that should be used and is there any differnce in off page. I researched and found that links from mobile sites would benefit the most. Please advice.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Should we go ahead and buy .mobi extension. Will that help?

[tedster]

From everything I hear, there is no advantage to the .mobi extension. If you have your mobile pages in a dedicated subdomain (or even a dedcated directory) you can do just as well.

The reason we have so little discussion in this thread is that there's little experience so far with SEO for mobile search. From what I discussed with others at Pubcon, it's just a matter of following best technical practices for any mobile site - small pages with minimal images and clear navigation - plus the kind of thing regular SEO would focus on. No one had any special SEO advice to offer for mobile search except the mobile sitemap.

Some users of new smartphones complain about being locked out of the REGULAR website and confined to just the mobile. So for user experience purposes, you might want to think about them.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Thanks for the reply Tedster.

I will be using all normal SEO stuff for now.

Regarding the subdomain, we have actually made the mobile site as mobile.example.com currently. So, I guess that is fine.

[eltercerhombre]

Just in case it's interesting to any of you, I did my own tests.

First, I published the mobile version in a subdomain, including the mobile sitemap and allowed all bots.

When my mobile pages started to rank in the regular searches instead of the normal ones, I blocked the normal googlebot and allowed on the mobile one.

But then GWT told that my sitemap was block, so I allowed the the normal Googlebot to crawl ONLY the sitemap.

Finally, I ended up having no pages indexed for this subdomain. But Googlebot-Mobile is still crawling.

I'm still wondering if I should let both bots crawl my mobile website, cross my fingers and expect Google to take good decisions. But as the mobile one makes no money to me, and won't make any significant amount... I can't care less as of now.

BTW: if anyone has some advise based on previous experiencies it's more than welcome.