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.

Like this article? Share, save, and spread it!