The amount of mobile devices being used to access the web is increasing day by day. This is interesting because the mobile market is a whole new segment your site can be getting traffic from, but the bad news is that mobile devices have many limitations, which make them different from PCs and if your site is not designed to be mobile-friendly, then your site is not mobile search ready.
Is your site optimized for the mobile generation? There’s no such thing as being lost in the woods anymore. Thanks to the new mobile technology, this gives consumers the power to directly connect from the palm of their hands. This means your site has to visually evolve as technology shrinks. Here’s how you minimize your site while maximizing your search ability.
Mobile Searchers Use Shorter Key phrases/Keywords
Whatever keypad you have on your mobile device but even then it becomes a pain when you have to enter long strings. This is why most mobile users don’t bother to enter long strings of texts. Long tail keywords that consist of 5 or more words might bring you traffic to a regular site but for a mobile site many users limit their searches to 2 words at most.
Keep pages short
The screens of mobile devices are small and reading long pages of text is next to impossible on that tiny screen. This is why you need to keep your pages short, so even if there is scrolling; it won’t need 5, 10, or more scroll downs in order to read a single page. This means, that if you want to achieve good keyword density for your target keywords, you need to put them in the portion of the text that fits into one screen. So be careful not to over-stuff the pages because this will have an adverse effect.
Optimize for local search
Mobile users search mostly for local stuff. In addition to shorter search key phrases, mobile searchers are also locally targeted. It is easy to understand when a user is standing in the street and is looking for a place to dine; the user is most likely looking for things in the neighborhood, not in another corner of the world. Searches like “pizza corner” are quite popular, which makes local search results even more important to concentrate on.
Put the essential info in a visible place
As already mentioned, scrolling down is not a favorite activity for mobile users. This means that if you want your essential info to be seen, you need to put it near the top because this is the most visible place on your site. When users come to your mobile site and don’t see right away what they are looking for, they will simply leave rather than scroll.
In Mobile Search, Top 10 Is Actually Top 3
Desktop searchers are not fond of scrolling endless pages either but in mobile search the limitations are even more severe. A page with 10 search results fits on the screen of a desktop but on a mobile device it might be split into 2 or more screens. Therefore, in mobile search, it is not Top 10, it is more Top 4, or even Top 3 because only the first 3 or 4 positions are on the first page and have a higher chance to attract the user’s attention without having to go to the next page.
Don’t Forget Meta.txt
Meta.txt is a special file, where you briefly describe the contents of your site and point the user agent to the most appropriate version for it. Search engine spiders directly index the meta.txt file so even if the rest of your site is not accessible, you will still be included in search results.