Mobile SEO

When users search from a smartphone Google will start to show only websites that have a good mobile experience. Google have also recently outlined some common mistakes from the mobile websites. If you are an avid smartphone user you may have experienced a couple of issues while browsing a website. One of the most common mistakes is that faulty redirects are in place when entering a web page from a mobile device instead of redirecting the user to the mobile optimised page the redirection always points to the homepage of the website, which is very annoying to users. Another common issue with redirects is that of not handling all mobile devices such as handling iPhone devices but not Android or Windows devices.

In 2012, Google provided more information on how to provide an Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and user friendly mobile websites. URLs play a vital role in SEO and in fact URLs are the main element of the different type of configurations that Google suggested. URLs are simply a web page address so a user can access it using a web browser. The 3 different configurations are explained briefly below.

Responsive Design

This is Google favourite option where the website design is responsive to the device that is being used to access the website. Thus a web page will use the same URL and HTML for desktop and mobile devices; however, using CSS to change the design of the page, to make it more mobile optimised. HTML and CSS are two of the most common technologies used to create a website. HTML is the markup language to create a web page and can be displayed using a web browser. Combining HTML with CSS provides styling and presentation capabilities to a web page. Therefore this configuration as mentioned above uses different CSS to presents the HTML in different ways depending on the device being used.

Dynamic Serving

This type of mobile configuration uses the same concept of having one original URL for every web page such as with Responsive Design. However, different HTML and CSS are loaded depending on the device being used. The website being accessed by a device detects the type of device and returns specific HTML, CSS and content to that device. To be more technically correct it is the server (and not the website) that detects the device being used and then the server returns the respective content.

Separate URLs

This method uses unique mobile URLs for every web page, and it is very common that the 'm.example.com/web-page-a' sub-domain is used. The equivalent URL for the desktop version would then be 'www.example.com/web-page-a'. For this configuration Google suggests to use special HTML to provide the alternative URL from each different version. For instance, in the desktop website in the HTML there will be a special tag that points to the URL of the mobile version.

Conrad Bugeja is a Search Engine Optimisation Consultant and Pay-Per-Click Consultant at Alert eBusiness Internet Marketing Division - www.alertemarketing.com