The mobile web is still very much in its infancy when compared to the world wide web. However, the increased popularity of mobile devices and the fact that more and more of us are taking up the mobile Internet challenge means that websites created to specifically cater to mobile device users are becoming a more viable challenge. Creating any mobile website offers a variety of challenges, not least of which is how to generate a good level of traffic – mobile SEO is still an underdeveloped area of online marketing but following certain practices can help generate traffic from search engines.

Code Validation

Validate a mobile site’s XHTML code. For the traditional Internet marketer this is sometimes seen as being more of an accessibility or design and development issue but it’s likely that mobile indexing will consider it to be of much greater importance. Use validation tools or, alternatively, ensure that the development company you use guarantees validated XHTML and other code for your website.

General Accessibility

Accessibility may also play a part and is not only important to Mobile SEO but is equally important to your visitors. The mobile web really hasn’t advanced as well as the traditional web yet (and we stress the word yet) and many mobile device manufacturers may offer software and browsers that are less than ideal solutions for reading mobile websites. By ensuring every section of every page is accessible in numerous mobile browsers and with a variety of screen resolutions you can further ensure that mobile spiders and mobile visitors can access your site.

Search Engine Tools For Mobile SEO

The major search engines, that is Google, Yahoo, and MSN, are likely to be equally as successful on the mobile web. Fortunately, they are each dedicated to providing some form of software tools that enable you to better index your own mobile website. The Google Webmaster Mobile Tools and Yahoo’s own software are very similar, in their application, to the main tools they offer Webmasters.

Optimised Pages And Link Profiles

Generally speaking, mobile SEO will be largely similar to standard SEO with regards to the practices of optimising pages and building links. Mobile pages will naturally be shorter and less wordy than your standard web page and this means greater concentration on even more precise keywords. With fewer words to optimise it will be more difficult to include a list of keywords repeated throughout the text while still offering genuinely useful information to visitors.

Image Search Engine Optimisation

Image SEO is also likely to be or greater benefit. As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, which in terms of the mobile web is a lot of content. Optimise images as well as your website content, include keywords in the relevant tags, develop links as you would for any website, and submit your mobile web pages to each of the search engines.

Advancing Techniques

Online marketing, and Search Engine Optimisation in particular, is a constant development of challenges. Just when the SEO community in general feels it has mastered a particular algorithm the search engines change the rules in order to defeat spam and unethical SEO techniques. For a less developed medium like mobile websites this is even more pertinent but by following the same kind of practices you would for a standard SEO campaign you should also be able to generate good search engine traffic for your mobile site.

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