Ensure Your Mobile Site is SEO Friendly

An increasing number of people are now using their mobile phones to perform searches on the internet. With this in mind it seems ever more important to have a mobile site ready to capture that particular audience.

When building a mobile phone site it is important that the search engines can index the pages and this is where some sites are losing out on the benefit of having a mobile presence. With many mobile sites, Google, and other search engines find that their bots are unable to crawl the site. Generally, this is because some mobile sites refuse access to anything except mobile phones, meaning that all search engines are blocked.

For some tips on ensuring that your mobile site is SEO friendly, see the points below:

• Create a Mobile Sitemap and submit it to Google. This will inform Google of the sites existence and encourage it to visit the site. For help in creating this sitemap see Webmaster Tools: Creating Mobile Sitemaps

• Ensure that your site can be crawled by all search engines e.g. allow the user-agents to crawl the site, especially the ‘Googlebot-Mobile’ user-agent. To do this, always look to see if the string ‘Googlebot-Mobile’ is included in the user-agent header

• Ensure that your mobile site’s URLs are recognised by the search engines. To do this, check that your Doc Type Definitions are in a format recognised by mobile devices e.g. XHTML Mobile.

Gemma Neesham
Project Manager