10 November 2006

Mobile Phone Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine marketing for mobile phones has been, up to now, a relatively taboo subject. There are many questions that are currently left unanswered, such as: "will the usual search engine ranking algorithm be applied to websites that specifically cater for mobile phones and hand held devices?"

If you are a SEO professional, you are more than likely to be in the process of developing, or thinking about developing, a website to try and dominate the mobile phone online market. Potentially, there is a massive market which can be tapped into; in fact, it is predicted that by 2010, 90% of the world will have mobile phone coverage. At the moment, Africa currently has the most expanding mobile phone market, nearly twice as much as the Asian market. The map below shows current levels of mobile phone usage across the world.













For a company to run a mobile phone search engine optimisation campaign for mobile phone users, the first and most important step is to make sure that a website is mobile compliant. To read more about mobile phone standards, visit the W3C mobile website.

Obviously, mobile phones have a limited screen area in which they can display information. This means that one will need to be very careful about what they choose to display. If you have ever visited your website through the eyes of a mobile user, you will notice that most of your styling and graphics have disappeared, and you are left with a text only version of your site.

Rules for developing a website for mobile devices

• Imagine you are a mobile user: you come across a website that has been poorly coded, and the information you are looking for is positioned right at the bottom of the page. You will either leave that site or become increasingly frustrated when trying to find your desired information, which will result in a poor user experience and no recurring visits. Using CSS and XHTML, you can position content wherever you like on a webpage, so that the most important information can be found at the top of the page.
• Your site's navigation might not be visible or accessible any more which will result in a user being stuck on a page or them leaving your site.
• Make sure the font sizes you have specified are correct so that the text isn't too small or large to read.
• Try and take full advantage of your design; make sure it is catered towards a mobile user and is as aesthetically pleasing as possible.
• Try and keep your content short and sweet, so the user doesn't have to ramble through a wade of unnecessary content.
• Have short descriptive titles that aren't misleading.
• Make all pages accessible and easy to scroll through.

All of these factors will result in a good mobile phone user experience.

Due to the current low level of mobile search activity, the only real industries that are benefiting from mobile search are travel, business, mobile phone and entertainment industries. But while mobile search may only be in its teething stage, major search engine players have been investing staggering amounts of time and money into its future. For instance, Nokia have selected Yahoo! to provide its search results for subscription users, and all Windows mobile and hand held devices have been set to MSN.

As the mobile phone industry develops, optimising pages to rank in the mobile search engines will be highly beneficial - and it's a great way to secure a large part of the market.

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