The Golden Hat

If you’re thinking about launching a mobile-ready version of your website then there are some fundamental rules you want to keep in mind to make the site optimized for your mobile audience. Follow these rules to be in good with Google and other major search engines:

1. Route users to a dedicated mobile version of your site using some standard PHP commands. Check out these sample PHP commands.

2. Use a valid markup language such as XHTML Basic and XHTML Mobile Profile. If the wrong markup language is selected then your site may not render correctly on the mobile device.

3. Select a DOCTYPE and XML header and identify character encoding. For example XHTML Basic 1.0 and UTF-8 encoding.

4. Validate the markup language used. You can do so via the w3c site, however you should ideally validate the markup language for mobile specific validation.

5. Use a linear layout to minimize or mitigate the need for horizontal navigation since it is highly user-unfriendly and challenging to do on some mobile devices.

6. Minimize or limit the use of tables.

7. Use mostly HTML code to keep the code “light” and minimal. You want the design to be simple, text-based, and straight forward.

8. Use thorough internal linking to make sure that all pages are linked together. Navigating back and forth on a mobile device can be challenging and time consuming as well.

9. Use Mobile Sitemaps to notify engines of the mobile site architecture.

10. Combine your mobile search campaign with your local search campaign, when possible, to ensure cross-marketing of both efforts since they are so interrelated.

In a nutshell you want to keep your design basic with interoperability in mind. The increase in mobile devices supporting web browsing and browsers turning to their cell phones for more functionality requires that many sites now have a bullet proof mobile search campaign. You can visit most of the major search engines, especially Google Mobile for advice on mobile search, or the mobile division of w3c for more technical details on guidelines and best practices.

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Udi Manber, VP of Engineering at Google and the person in charge of Google’s Search Quality Team, gave those of us in the Search world a refreshing dose of transparency into some of Google’s practices and internal organization. As Udi points out the secrets of their Google search algorithm are treated as the Google crown jewels for a few very simple reasons: competition and abuse.

Of course we can’t expect to be given the key to the lock protecting Google’s “crown jewel”, but as Search professionals or those invested in the quality of online content we can follow the museum rule of look, but don’t touch. So Google is showing signs of extroversion and opening up a bit. As Udi Manber wrote, “…being completely secretive isn’t ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past. We will try to periodically tell you about new things, explain old things, give advice, spread news, and engage in conversations.”

Something that I would like to have more visibility into as a Search Professional is Google’s steps into improving the user experience. Udi makes it clear that Google’s primary goal is not to improve the user experience, it is Google’s ONLY goal. I find it valuable to see the direction that the major search engines are moving in so that I can evaluate a search engine not only by the quality and relevancy of the content found in it’s search results, but in the quality and relevancy of their new developments, product improvements and innovations.

Udi spoke of the approximately 450 user experience improvements implemented last year by Google’s Search Quality Team, averaging a blistering speed of about 9 user experience roll-outs per week. That’s pretty impressive. Chances are though I’d have to dig and dig to find mention of most of these improvements. One could comb through the Official Google Blog or various other search industry insider blogs, yet I doubt we would find mention of all of these improvements and their anticipated impact on Google user experience.

Maybe I’m just lazy. But Udi, if you’re listening, I for one would find great value in seeing a list of these user experience improvements. With so much evaluation and refinement going on with the Search Quality Team I can’t help but wonder what’s coming out next!?

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