Translating Traditional SEO Practices to the Mobile Platform

Companies who apply many of the traditional SEO practices to their mobile website will ensure that their site stands out in a crowded market.

Here are some of the common SEO practices that should be incorporated into your mobile web design:

Create Relevant Page Titles and Accurate Page Descriptions

Mobile site page titles are one of the first factors mobile browsers use to determine where a page will show in search results. Similar to traditional SEO, it is important that page titles reflect the terms that people use to search, increasing the likelihood that the site will appear relevant and receive better page rankings.

Apply Appropriate Keywords in Page Headlines and Text

Consumers use mobile for more focused and task-oriented searches (i.e. for a specific location or product). This is different from how most people search from a desktop computer. By understanding consumer behavior, companies can anticipate queries and incorporate key search terms into page text, increasing detection from mobile search engines.

Optimise Outbound Links

Incorporating outbound links to relevant sources provides a more complete user experience and associates the mobile site with other trusted sites and companies on the mobile web.

Attract Inbound Links

As with traditional link building, working to attract inbound links to your mobile pages will garner higher quality scores and page rankings. This can be accomplished through social media tags, buttons and working to build links from other mobile sites relevant to your brand.

Build in Accordance to Standard Web Coding

With the wide variety of operating systems supported by mobile, it makes it extremely important for companies to follow valid HTML coding. Browsers parse through HTML code to determine search relevance. Any errors or invalid coding or links will result in broken pages and a lower ranking. Sites built in accordance to quality standards will ensure a consistent experience across all devices.

And for those of you who are more advanced SEO’s, you might also want to investigate next generation languages like HTML5 to further increase page rankings in mobile search engines due to it’s inherent faster loading and cleaner code.

Additionally, you can also read up on my SEO Best Practices: Guide to Optimizing your site for the search engines here should you need further information regarding on-site SEO practices.

At the end of the day, mobile SEO is a powerful tool to dramatically increase your mobile traffic to mobile pages and drive revenue, and it’s essential for companies to think strategically about how to leverage common mobile SEO practices in order to increase brand loyalty and maximise traffic.

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