SEO Guide for optimizing mobile site

Algorithms for mobile engines are far less relevant than those for the web. You have probably seen the quality of the poorer results from Google’s mobile index. Some results are derived from a few forums and some . edu sites.

This is probably due to lack of mobile content on the one hand but also the irrelevance of the algorithm itself. Google is still in the process of updating its mobile index and the results promise to be more qualitative, although it is far better than it was 2 years ago.

Guide to Mobile SEO

This guide is for webmasters who engage in mobile sites and want to appear in the top results of search engines like Google Mobile version Mobile and Yahoo! mobile search.

For those interested, here is a non-exhaustive listing of search engines for mobile phone Search Engine URL

Google Mobile: mobile . google . com
Google Mobile: google . com / xhtml
Yahoo! Mobile: mobile . yahoo . com / search
AOL Mobile Search: mobile . aolsearch . com
Nokia Mobile Search: (Country or region such as europe; asia) . nokia . com / explore-services / search-o1
Technorati Mobile: technorati . com / mobile-users
4INFO Mobile Search: 4info . com / browse

Best Practices for mobile SEO

1. The content must be easily accessible and crawlable:a. avoid  iframes, Ajax, flash; which constitute a real impediment to easy access to the site. Avoid all the design elements that are not necessary.b. Remember, your site is reduced to screen size of mobile phone that asks for your site, make sure that the titles, meta data, urls, are as small as possible to be properly displayed on the screens.
2. The keywords should match the engine results:a. Google and other engines develop the concept of “predictive modeling” – ie, after the user has typed a few letters from his search, the engines are trying to predict the search and presents the irrelevant search results.
   If you know how the keywords appear in the predictive search, you can optimize your content and content that are optimized for it. 

   b. Follow all standard SEO optimizations including: optimization of heading (H1, Hey … H6), content optimization of anchor-text links, optimizing titles and meta data.

3. Optimize your site for a wide variety of mobile platforms (mobile phone, PDA, blackberry)a. Use 100% XHTML  code (WAP 2.0), cHTML (iMode) or WML (WAP 1.2)b. Validate your site through the validator code such as the W3C mobile validation.

Improve the crawl and indexing by Mobile search engines

1. Implement a mobile  robots.txt file and meta.txt filea. Meta.txt file is a text file that presents the user-agent links to the best version of mobile site depending on the mobile platform. Make sure the file exists and is placed at the root of the site.b. Make sure the robots.txt file is available for mobile phones crawlers
2. Submit your Mobile Sitemap to search enginesa. Google, Yahoo, MSN and most other engines accept mobile sitemaps, so feel free to submit them. The Mobile Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, along with a specific tag and a rule namespace added. More info on Google Mobile Sitemaps.b. If your site is local or regional, you can subscribe to the local directories.
3. Linking strategiesa. We must develop a strategy for linking with sites relevant mobile to increase your popularity on the mobile web and mobile improve your SEO.b. Make sure your internal linking is developed in links those are the most important pages of the site internallyc. For both linking strategies (internal and external), use of anchor-text with rich keywords that are crucial
4. Analysis of Mobile SEOa. Make benchmark and analyze your performance and results of your SEO in order to draw relevant conclusions.