Mobile SEO Essentials: Techniques And Practices

 Mobile SEO, Why Important ?

Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) are the techniques which ensure that your site shows up in search results of various Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. SEO is essential to your success and it should be. SEO ensures that your site gets maximum traffic, a better ranking and great audience. Today, mobile is a direct avenue for additional traffic and it’s underutilized by most bloggers. Today, I am going to show you some techniques to optimize your site for Mobile traffic and various mistakes to avoid.
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 Mobile Optimization Best Practices

Mobile Indexing

Notifying search engines that you have mobile-formatted pages is one of the first rules of mobile configuring for SEO. Like traditional desktop SEO, ensuring search engines can find and index your pages and content is imperative for success. Websites can signal your mobile configuration to search engines to make sure they understand your mobile setup.
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Mobile Configurations

Responsive Web Design. The server always sends the same HTML code to all devices and CSS is used to alter the rendering of the page depending on the receiving device. Said another way: Responsive design serves all devices with the same code that automatically adjusts for screen size. This is the most effective, responsible configuration.

Dynamic Serving. Depending on the user agent requesting the page, the server responds with different HTML (and CSS) on the same URL. Mobile content is “hidden” when crawled using a desktop agent with this setup. This is not an ideal configuration.

Separate URLs. Each desktop URL has an equivalent, different, URL serving mobile-optimized content. The result: desktop users are presented with one URL, mobile users another. This is also not ideal. Your SEO value is diluted, as some people will link to one URL, some to the other URL.

Mobile SEO

Page Load Speed: Page load speed is key to success. Usability and the quality of the visitor experience can be dramatically impacted by page load speed. More than just optimizing images, mobile page load speed optimization involves leveraging proper browser caching, reducing redirects, and minifying code. Ensure you are taking page load speed into consideration with mobile SEO.

Indexation Blocking: Few years back, mobile devices couldn't handle all available code when browsing the web. However, now a days its not a problem for smart phones to handle and evaluate the code to give best user experience. Sites that currently block elements of CSS, JavaScript, or images should reevaluate their blocking. Hiding content is never a good thing in SEO, especially with mobile.

User Experience: Considering the user’s experience on mobile devices is an obvious, yet often over looked aspect of SEO for mobile.  Too much flash or animated stuff results in poor user experience and increase page load speed and as a result you will end up with less visitors. So, remember that mobile design that delivers a great user experience is most often simple and clean.
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Titles and Meta Descriptions: Limited screen space throws extra attention on the length of meta titles and descriptions in search results pages (SERPs). Best practice length for titles on mobile is 40-60 characters and meta descriptions within 90 characters and spaces. Additionally, a search result without a rich snippet and one with a rich snippet look completely different and perform drastically differently in mobile vs. desktop devices. It’s important to review meta titles and descriptions and how they appear in SERPs.
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 Mistakes To Avoid

Videos and Embedded Images: Visual content that isn’t optimized for mobile devices will be biggest reason of less traffic. You’ve spent such a long time developing great content; don’t lose momentum by neglecting your mobile audience. By ensuring non-Flash elements render on your pages, HTML5 usage is consistent, and that video optimized for specific browsers.

Sitemaps: If you are using two URLs, creating a mobile sitemap is an essential part of having proper indexation on your pages for mobile search. Submit an XML sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster Tools, paying careful attention to keep mobile pages separate from desktop. Crawl errors are available to show you where Google and Bing find errors within your sitemap. Whenever you have an opportunity to improve crawling and indexation, take it.
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Redirects: Ensuring your site has limited redirects is essential to SEO on mobile. When individuals are trying to access your site you want to serve them the correct versions. We recommend you use server-side redirects instead of JavaScript redirects.
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 That's it !!

Mobile SEO is evolving and new techniques and practices are emerging frequently. I will update this article when new major shift comes up. In the meanwhile you may practice above techniques to make your site/blog SEO optimized and get maximum audience.