If your site needs to be accessible to mobile browsers, you have got some planning to do. With the advent of the smartphone, an increasing number of people are using mobile phones to browse the net. Your site needs to look its best.

Not every business needs to be ready for mobile browsing just yet. Mobile browsing is for specific information that doesn’t, as yet, cover the whole web. However, not every business may be aware of the behaviour profile of their target users as it applies to mobile browsing. For example, if your business provides financial services, you may feel that your target users browse for you when at the office or at home. If your site provides to-the-minute market information, however, users may rely on constant updates to make their financial plans. It’s important to research this aspect of your target market carefully to ensure you’re in the right position.

If you do decide to prepare for mobile browsing, there are a series of decisions you need to make.

• Alter your existing site, or build a new mobile-friendly one? This is the decision from which the other decisions branch off. It is not always necessary to build a separate mobile-friendly site, but if you have to make too many adjustments to your current site, it may be worth it. Many businesses host mobile-friendly sites on a sub domain of their existing site and notify the mobile search engines and browsers of their existence. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about the processes of mobile browsing
• Build for specific mobile technologies, or keep things general. The discrepancies between phones produced two years ago and phones produced two months ago are huge. If you design a site for a modern phone, you can make use of more advanced technologies, but you might not display on some phones. At the moment, it’s very difficult to please everyone

Mobile browsing has been limited in the past by the need for WAP coding, which not every business could be bothered with. Today, many mobile browsers render HTML and its relatives. Coding your mobile site in HTML, however, could mean you won’t appear on older mobile phones. Similarly, the more modern the mobile browser is, the more likely it is to properly display JavaScript and the mobile versions of Flash.

If your target users predominantly use the latest phones, then it’s possible you don’t have to worry about what parts of your site will display. You may decide that the risk of some of your users not being able to see your content isn’t worth it. You may take the most complicated, but best, option of coding everything so that mobile browsers are identified and responded to automatically.

• Research for mobile SEO, or keep applying your existing methods. This isn’t really a choice. The mobile search engines operate in slightly different ways to traditional search engines. There are also more of them to take into consideration and the players are changing all the time. Separate search engine optimisation will be necessary for your mobile site

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