Mobile smartphones are revolutionising society. Nowadays, wherever you go, you always see people are browsing, looking for interesting items or reading an article through their smartphones. Today, it is a medium of constant communication for their loved ones and the most used tool in search of answers for extensive information through the internet. According to the data below, mobile smartphones surpassed the usage of the Personal Computer (PC), and it’s becoming an essential tool in reaching your potential online customers, readers, and buyers.
4 reasons why your website needs to have a mobile optimised page
- Difficulty in viewing a desktop version on a mobile version device.
- Fonts and text are too small for your eye.
- Zoom and pinch frustration are likely to abandon the site.
- You’re losing tons of potential readers and customers online.
Mobile SEO Configuration Introduction
There are a few things you need to bear in mind before configuring mobile for SEO. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that it shows up on the different mobile search engines. You should get similar results to what you’re searching for in Google desktop search to Google mobile search results. Then, the second thing is you need to correctly configure your site so that it will run on multiple devices.
4 Basic Mobile SEO Configurations
1. Responsive Web Design
This is the preferable method to implement for your mobile website. The responsive web design (RWD) is very simple; the server sends the same HTML code to all devices, and the CSS is used to alter the process to fit and adjust on every device. It’s easier to link and share your content with just a single URL. The Google algorithms or Googlebot should be able to detect the RWD setup and crawl every page including CSS, Javascript, and images.
Tag this code after your website header (<head>) code
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>
Via Web Media Maker
To learn more about RWD set-up, Pete LePage discusses it further here.2. Dynamic Serving
Dynamic serving serves two different HTML and CSS codes with the same URL to fit or adjust depending on the user-agent page request on each device. A server hint sends a request that Googlebot for mobile phones is seeking to crawl and to discover the mobile content through an implementation of “Vary HTTP header” code.
Detecting User-agents Setup
There are times that the Googlebot detects a desktop user-agent as a mobile user-agent or vice-versa. It’s a common mismatch where Googlebot treated tablet devices as smartphones without any intention. This is why you need to add a specific mobile “user-agent string” in your header.
Via Webmaster Central
Here’s a huge list of specific user-agent strings.
3. Separate URLs
This configuration has an equally different URL serving for desktop, mobile optimised URL or even for tablets. Google algorithms do not favor any usage of URL formats as long as they are all accessible by Googlebot user-agent. These are the most common configuration for pages like www.yourdomain.com for desktop and m.yourdomain.com for mobile. The hint signal serves as “Annotations” to Googlebot which would indicate that the website is using a separate URL type of mobile optimise page configuration.
Via Google Developer
4. Tablet and Other Devices
Google does not have any specific hint signals for tablet optimised websites. But, Google recommends separating tablet-dedicated URLs and use of rel=”canonical tags on each page equivalent to desktop URLs. Google also recommends to include <link rel=”alternate” media=”handheld”> tags for feature phones. If you’re using WordPress CMS, you can easily download handheld plugins.
4 Common Mistakes for Beginners to Avoid
- Neglecting your mobile customers
- Creating different domains for mobile
- Sticking to old-school website development
- Unplayable videos or broken images
Website Content will load faster using AMP
Via resultfirst.com
Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) can dramatically improve the performance and speed of the site content. It allows the user to instantly read interesting content without any additional hindrance like pop-up screens, pop-up scripts and ads that would cause the content to load slowly. Google tends to provide good keyword rankings when you apply AMP on your website content. On the contrary, implementing AMP is only good for most sites that have lots of published article blog posts and news content. If you have an existing mobile optimised page but do not have a huge frequency of published content, there’s no need for you to change to an AMP entirely. AMP is equal to a normal HTML code format but there are a few additional changes on the HTML elements for AMP implementation e.g. <img> to <amp-img>. It can work on both Mobile optimise pages and non-optimise mobile pages. To learn more, visit AMP project for the HTML recommended formats.
Recommendations
We recommend testing each of your website’s mobile compatibility using Mobile-Friendly Test and PageSpeed Insights (mobile and desktop version). Simply follow the recommended instructions provided to your website’s results to improve performance and speed. We also recommend that you read our onpage SEO strategy for proper onsite optimisation setup. To start with, if you’re having difficulties on choosing what mobile strategy your website needs, just fill out the form and we will let you know.