Having a website isn’t enough for brands. You need to go mobile!
Mobile web browser Opera Mini has said that usage around the world has jumped 11% in just a month, highlighting the importance of brands having a presence of the web.
Data transfers have gained 16% as around 40 million people used Opera Mini in October. That’s an 11.3% increase from September 2009 and more than 155% compared to October 2008.
As mobile web use is clearly growing rapidly, it is important that your site has not only a good, usable mobile presence, but it is also essential that it be visible in mobile search.
These days, as a marketer, you can’t ignore mobile users. The rate at which consumers are accessing the web via mobile devices is growing rapidly, largely thanks to the increasing popularity and production of smartphones. This opens up a whole new platform from which to reach people with ads and it is certainly not enough to just get by with banners, search and display as they’d appear on the ‘normal’ web.
Many companies and brands have spent the last couple of years or so redesigning their web pages to fit the mobile screen. The introduction of apps has meant these brands and companies can have a completely new product available for the web and it’s made to size.
Just having a mobile site isn’t even enough anymore. Users have to be able to find it and just because you have a good ranking in Google does not mean that your mobile site has a good ranking in Google’s mobile search engine, or is even indexed at all.
Google recently shared a few important tips for making sure your mobile site is being indexed in Google’s Mobile Search:
1. Create a mobile sitemap and submit it to Google so Google knows it exists. This can be done using Google Webmaster Tools, just like with a regular sitemap.
2. To make sure Googlebot-Mobile can access your site, allow any User-agent to access it (you should also be aware that Google may change its User-agent information at any time without notice, so it is not recommended that you check if the User-agent exactly matches ‘Googlebot-Mobile’).
3. Check that your mobile-friendly URLs’ DTD (Doc Type Definition) declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML.
Also, keep in mind that if you run both a regular site and a mobile version of it, there is a possibility that the wrong version will show up in the wrong search results.
Another way you can make sure a user is pointed to the right version of your site is simply to provide a link. That’s what Google does (if you access the mobile version of Google, you will find a link to the desktop version).