Wednesday 4 May 2016

A mobile friendly website and its Search Engine Optimization

With the Google's growing emphasis on mobile friendly websites, marketing professionals are more concerned about making their website mobile friendly. Although, it has not been officially announced but it is a buzz that Google's new algorithm is considering mobile friendliness as an important criteria for ranking of web pages into its search results. In fact it has been seen that about 40% of internet users are mobile users only. It doesn’t matter whether Google considers mobile friendliness as a parameter or not but due to growing numbers of mobile users, it is clear that web masters have to take the path of mobile friendliness if they want their site to be seen by a large population.

What is a mobile friendly website? 

What is a mobile friendly website | Velsof

A mobile friendly website is a kind of website which has been optimized to provide a complete viewing experience of websites on mobile devices without any hassle i.e. being able to view a content properly without any need to zoom it. Here, websites are designed in such a way that they can serve both the mobile as well as desktop users. Some of the components of an effective mobile friendly sites are as follows:

- Users don't have to scroll horizontally in order to browse the complete view of the site. 
- Links are arranged in such a way that there is enough space between the links so that they can be easily clicked.  
- Avoid unnecessary plugins and flash-player which slows down the mobile web page loading.
- Use HTML and CSS for better designing and faster viewing experience. 
- Utilize a good site map which is understandable by Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.

What can you do to improve ranking of your mobile site?

Mobile SEO is the technique employed in order to improve your site ranking on the mobile search results. Mobile SEO or Mobile Search Engine Optimization makes your site easily understandable by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and such others.

Steps to improve your site ranking: 

1. Make it mobile friendly

Making your site mobile friendly is a complex job to do but once you do it, half of the SEO is done automatically. You can make your site mobile friendly by applying any of the three methods mentioned below:

a) Responsive Approach 

When you make your site responsive, Google understands it properly and there is no need to apply any extra code. You just have to apply the view port code given by Google on your website. It automatically adjusts the size of the window according to the screen size of the device.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

No doubt, you have to do some extra coding in addition to this code. This code is used only for optimizing the screen size but it is also important that you optimize the content and other components in the frame.

Steps to improve your site ranking | Velsof

b)  Dynamic serving Approach

Here, a webmaster designs separate pages for desktop and mobile respectively. When using the dynamic approach, you are serving the pages according to the type of device requesting the site. For this, you have to inform Google that you are using separate pages for both the platforms from the same URL. If you do not inform Google then it might think that you are serving some irrelevant data in the particular URL and your ranking might get affected.

Note: User-Agent code is utilized in the header tag in order to tell Google that site might look different in mobile and desktop browsers.

c) Using Separate URLs 

One can use separate URLs for desktop and mobile sites. For example, www.domain.com for desktop users and www.m.domain.com for mobile users. But this can create a confusion for Google as it will not detect automatically that you are using separate URLs for different platforms. One has to inform Google about this particular scenario.

On the desktop version of the page, add a link
rel=”alternate” tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This will help Google bot to discover the location of your site’s mobile version.

On the mobile version of the page, add a link
rel=”canonical” tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.

2. Inform Google 

Once your site is mobile friendly, you have to inform Google that you are mobile now. You need to submit your site to Google. However, optimize your site map properly before submitting it to Google. It is better to submit each and every URL or page so that Google can understand it in a much better way.

3. Optimize the content

The contents of the pages are very important for SEO point of view. Each page should be designed to be mobile friendly and should be provided with proper meta tags and description. Avoid keywords stuffing as you can’t make a fool of search engines. Moreover, this illegitimate use of keywords will ultimately degrade your ranking.

You need to optimize the loading time of your page. Google considers the loading time of a page for ranking purpose. The page load time need to be optimized by avoiding plugins and flash players as they are designed for desktop versions specifically. Apart from this, other helpful tips for mobile speed optimization are mentioned below:

- Avoid pop ups in mobile versions as it can frustrate the user.
- Do not use unnecessary mobile redirects as it can increase the load time of your web page.
- Do not block CSS, JavaScript or images using robots.txt as it might affect your ranking because blocking them interferes with the indexing of the site on Google.

Following the above steps can make your website adaptable to various cross platform devices. You can increase your conversion rates by focusing on the need of various cross platform users. Once, you are having a quick loading mobile site, you can effortlessly grab more conversions and sales for your business.

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