Friday, March 14, 2014

Mobile Experience Matters for SEO

In olden days Mobile SEO has taken a last seat to desktop SEO, but that commenced to vary this summer when Google Matt cutts spoke about the significance of mobile SEO at SMX Advanced. After that Google accepted on its Official Webmaster Central blog that it would effect on developing websites in organic search that offer positive experiences for mobile guests. Normally, Google remains moderately quiet about upcoming algorithm changes, but they have been vocal on mobile SEO. Here are some errors and useful instructions on how to prepare your website for mobile SEO. Those are:
  • Redirects
  • Videos
  • Quality
  • Googlebot- Mobile
  • Interstitials & Overlays
  • Page Load Speed

1. Redirects:

Under Google new instructions, site could be penalized if a full web page redirects mobile users to an unrelated page on the mobile-optimized website. In the example below, mobile users who navigate to www.example.com/fishes or www.example.com/dogs are redirected to the homepage of the mobile site, instead of information about those particular topics. This makes it harder for mobile users to access the content they want, which can be frustrating and finally lead to site abandonment. Since, Google is in the business of rewarding positive user experience, it scowls upon improper redirects.

2. Video:

Another issue is interactive graphics, which often are not available to all mobile users. For example, Flash will not work on iPhones or Android versions 4.1 and above. And also create these elements using native HTML5 elements or remove them from mobile pages.

3. Quality:

Check your mobile site frequently to confirm your mobile-friendly pages work and do not result in errors or blank pages. If your website's content is not accessible in a Smartphone friendly layout, then it is better to serve the desktop version of the page than blank page.

4. Googlebot-Mobile:

Improperly managing the Googlebot-Mobile crawler can also affect on search engine ranking. Conforming to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog many of the sites make the mistake of creating infinite redirect loops. These mistakes will be done by redirecting Googlebot-Mobile for smart phones from web pages to pages advanced for feature phones, which then redirect back to the complete pages.

5. Interstitials & Overlays:

Promoting your Smartphone app on your mobile site isn’t a bad idea, but be careful how you go about it. Methods such as interstitials, an intermediate page that stops the way between two related pages or overlays can cause indexing issues for Smartphone-optimized content and may be too disruptive for visitors. If you must promote your app to users, Google advises using an easy banner in line with the page’s content.

6. Page Load Speed:

Page speed is also very essential for mobile websites as desktop sites. Pages should load on Smartphones in less than one second. Any longer than that, and users begin to disengage. Google Analytics reported last year that the average web page takes more than 10 seconds to load on mobile devices.
By using below steps we can improve page speed. Those are:
  • Content
  • Images
  • Social sharing tools

Final Thoughts:

A recent study exposed that only 6% of the top 500 companies have websites that fulfill with Google’s mobile requirements. When they don’t provide mobile versions of many indexed pages hence 70% of these websites could see a drop in search rankings. These steps are now useful to make your website available to users using smartphones and other mobile devices. This will increase customer allegiance, and help you outrank your competitors in search.