Developing your online presence is about more than simply building a website nowadays. You also have to think about the presentation of your site on mobile devices. Beyond looks, you need to think about search engine optimization or SEO as well. this might sound intimidating at first, but we promise it’s fairly straightforward once you get a handle on the basics.
There are a couple of different types of mobile sites you can build that employ mobile SEO. First up is responsive web design. These sites use the same HTML on all versions of the site but different CSS is loaded depending on what device you view the site on. If you decide to build a site this way, you’ll need to use an @media only screen that has a max-width value of 640px. This will ensure the optimum presentation of your content on a smartphone-sized device.
Now, you could also offer different HTML from the same URL. This is called dynamic serving and is a server side specification that offers up different HTML and CSS depending what device you use to request information from a URL. Same URL, different content, pretty much.
Another thing you can do for mobile SEO is to use the Vary HTTP header. This tells the server to consider the device being used before serving up a page from the cache. It can also tell Googlebot about the mobile version of your site.
Your last option is to use different URLs for your regular site content and your mobile content. So, if someone visits your site from a desktop, they’ll get the regular version of your site but if someone visits from a mobile device, they’ll get the mobile URL, which is usually something along the lines of m.yoursite.com.
All of these methods are suitable for developing a good mobile SEO strategy, however, the first two are preferable because they are the easiest for Googlebot to crawl and it’s more likely for your mobile site to be cached faster these ways.
Truly, developing a site for mobile devices isn’t all that different from developing one for your standard desktop, however, there are some things to keep in mind in order to make your mobile site easy to find by the search engines. As you know, SEO is vital for improving site visibility. So it stands to reason that taking your mobile site into account will further boost your rankings.