Mobile SEO Guide

Having a website is great!
However, it doesn’t stop here.
Remember, it’s only the beginning.
Your journey to a fruitful, rewarding and successful online venture begins by having a website. But in the fast-paced online world you have to be equally fast if you really want to reap the fruits of success. One such major factor for success in the online world is Mobile SEO or Mobile Optimization. At this juncture, you may be little bit confused. Don’t worry. It’s obvious. Let me make things crystal clear to you. So, simply stay with me.
Know the Online Scenario

First and foremost, the online world is fiercely competitive. Here, only the fittest survive. Every day thousands of new websites crop up and each day thousands of websites die a premature death. Such is the “cruel reality” of the World Wide Web.
Secondly, in the online world the website visitor is the real king. So, you have to fulfill the demands and expectations of your website visitor so that he or she can be converted to a customer. Until and unless the demands and expectations of your online visitor are not fulfilled, he or she will simply shun your website forever. And this will hardly take few seconds. So, this means that you just have few initial seconds in which you have to convince your website visitor that you are the perfect resource for him or her.
Thus, you have to come out as a winner and should be successful in winning the hearts of your online visitor. This will be the game changer for you in the online world.
The “Big” Question

Now, you would be wondering how this will happen?
Yes, this is the “Big” question.
Well, let me tell you that there is no simple formula. Yet there are ways in which you can drive visitors, engage visitors, and finally convert your visitor into a happy and loyal customer. In this context, making your website mobile-friendly holds a special place. As things stands now, if your website is not optimized for mobile devices such as Smartphones and Tablets, you simply will end up losing business. This means that you have to take “mobile explosion” really seriously and adopt such practices that make your website mobile friendly.

The Key Focus – Mobile SEO and Mobile Optimization

This leads us to discover the “practices” which need to follow to make a website mobile-friendly. These practices can easily be clubbed into Mobile SEO and Mobile Optimization.
As a website owner you have to pay attention for Mobile Optimization and go on to follow Mobile SEO Techniques so that your website becomes really fit for handling search engine traffic from mobile devices. Moreover, Google’s latest algorithm tweak critically focuses on seeing that your website supports mobile friendly search or not. If your website doesn’t meet its specifications, your website rankings take a serious dip; you lose out on visitor traffic from search engine which erodes your business returns from the online platform.
So, you have to make sure that you follow a perfect Mobile SEO Strategy and have Mobile Optimization.
How to Get Started
To help you with Mobile SEO and Mobile Optimization, I hereunder list down various techniques of making your website mobile friendly so that your visitors find your website thoroughly engaging when they hook on to their mobile devices and surf your website. With Mobile Optimization, you ensure that your visitors experience optimized performance when they access your site from their mobile devices. It fine tunes areas such as site design, site structure, page speed and number of other factors make sure that your mobile visitors don’t shun your website and look for other resources online.
There are some key characteristics which make a website mobile friendly or mobile optimized. For instance, a site is said to be mobile friendly when it …..
When it presents content well on a mobile device
does not require zooming
is easily readable on various screen sizes
is easily navigable
is helpful for mobile audience
is properly understood by Google
It is important that you start mobile optimization as soon as you can and also make sure that Google understands it so that your site gets appropriately ranked by Google which ultimately helps you in gaining traffic to your site from mobile devices.

Your Mobile SEO Guide

So, here’s your Mobile SEO Guide – The Best Mobile SEO Practices:
(This guide illustrates the steps and techniques of making your website mobile friendly in accordance with Google documentation.)
1. Page Speed: Page Speed is critical for mobile users. For getting optimal page speed you need to optimize images, get to minify code, leverage browser caching and also reduce the number of redirects. These are essential points which you need to follow for getting optimal page speed for your website.
2. Stop Blocking CSS, JavaScript, or Images: If you are one of those webmasters who block one or all these three elements for your mobile site, then for Mobile SEO purposes you need to stop doing it. Now, mobile devices support all of these elements and the Smartphone GoogleBot wants to see and categorize the same content that users do. So don’t hide CSS, JavaScript or Images. These elements also help Google recognize that your website is responsive or different mobile solution.
3. Mobile Site Design: Mobile devices have revolutionized the way sites are being designed. For having Mobile SEO Website, webmasters need to pay take care of certain specific issues such as:
 Don’t Use Flash: The plug-in may not be available on your user’s mobile device which translates that they would be missing out the fun. So, when you want to have special effects, use HTML5 instead.
 Don’t Use Pop-ups: Using Pop-ups on your mobile device leads to high bounce rate. It is a really a nuisance to try and close these on a mobile device.
Adopt Website Design for the Fat Finger: To avoid accidental clicks on touch screen navigation create website design for the fat finger.
4. Don’t Forget to Optimize Titles and Meta Descriptions: Mobile devices provide less screen space for searching. So as a thumb rule to show your best work in SERPs you should be as concise as possible when coming out with Titles, URLs, and Meta Descriptions.
5. Have Schema.org structured Data: The limited screen space is the basic reason why search results with rich snippets is even more likely to stand out on mobile search than on a desktop search.
6. Don’t Forget to Optimize for Local Search: If you are running a business which has a local element to it, then don’t forget to optimize your mobile content for local search. This calls for standardizing your name, address, phone number and also requires you to include your city and state name in your website’s metadata.
7. Mobile Site Configuration: Responsive Design, Dynamic Serving, Separate Mobile URL: This is easily the most important factor when doing Mobile SEO. So, when setting your site you have to decide whether you would like to go for Responsive Design, Dynamic Serving or separate site configuration.
However, let me tell you that Google prefers Responsive Design. Having a website which adopts Responsive Design makes sure that the website content automatically adapt to the screen size of user’s mobile device and so you can serve the same content to mobile and desktop users. It makes sure that users get a website that is capable of adapting the content according to their devices.
Whereas, in dynamic serving you can display different content to mobile visitors than you do for desktop visitors. This is done using the Vary HTTP Header. So, the content displayed will vary based on the user agent which requests the page.
Then you can even go for having a second parallel site for mobile users. So you can have completely customized content for mobile visitors. Here, to avoid URL confusion, in your parallel mobile site you can use “m” subdomain. However, you have to make sure that your site redirects are all in place and need to set up rel= “canonical” so as to avoid duplicate content issues.
Final Words

The above Mobile SEO Guide explicitly explains what you need to do to achieve Mobile SEO or Mobile Optimization. It is a must that you make your site mobile friendly so as to properly cater the requirements and aspirations of your mobile visitors. Remember, you cannot ignore mobile visitors so it is better for you to get things done as far as Mobile SEO or Mobile Optimization is concerned.

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