Optimizing Your Mobile Site
If you don’t have a mobile version of your site, get one. Get one as soon as you can. Just about everyone has a smart phone these days and you could be missing out on a lot of traffic if your site is not compatible or will not display well on a smart phone. In this article, we will give you a few pointers and tell you what you need to do to optimize your mobile site.
First, you should know what we mean when we say “mobile site”. A mobile site is a version of your normal site except that it is optimized to be displayed and usable on a mobile phone. The basics of mobile site optimization involve altering the width and some of the structure in your site so that it displays correctly in the mobile browser.
Now it is time to get to some tips.
You are not going to perfectly mimic the intent of your full sized website on a mobile browser so when you create a mobile version of it, make sure the important bits are going to be easy for the user to interact with. You may have to cut some of your sites features out so if you do, make sure it is the less important bits and not the important ones.
Make sure your mobile site works on different types of phones. You are going to have visitors from iPhones, Androids, Blackberries and many other phones that come in different sizes and resolutions so make sure that your site looks good on all of them as opposed to focusing on just one.
Don’t forget about tablet users. Tablets have a larger screen size but they are becoming popular to the point that it is worth considering. Make sure your site displays well on 7″-13″ tablets. Remember, they are normally touch screen as well so double check that all of your links are easy to open using the touch screen.
Add a mobile XML sitemap. Same concept as our traditional sitemap, just a mobile version of it. This will allow the search engines to easily navigate through your mobile site just as it would using an XML sitemap for a tradition site.
One thing that is often overlooked is making sure that Google see’s your mobile site as just that, a mobile version of your site as opposed to a rip off of your site with duplicate content. To make sure Google understands what is going on here, the best thing to do is to use a rel=canonical tag. This tag is a special mobile tag which is used to tell the search engines that this is a mobile version of your site. This tells Google that it is not duplicate content and it should be treated as a mobile version of the main site.
Follow this guide and you should have a nice working mobile site which you can use to bring in even more traffic to your website. Smart phones are only gaining in popularity and this is a trend that will not go away any time soon.
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