Mobile Search Engine Optimization - What's the answer?
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There are a number of steps that can be taken to improve the accessibility of mobile data and to optimize it for mobile search engines. Some of these are relatively obvious, such as minimizing and optimizing interfaces, submitting the site to all the major mobile search engines and as many of the minor ones as possible, and being sure to allow their crawlers into the site afterward.
Others are - or should be - familiar already to most content publishers as they are standard practice on all types of web sites. These include things like conforming to the relevant mobile standards (the W3C's mobile validator - currently in beta - can be used to verify this), specifying the appropriate doctype and character encoding in page headers, and keeping the site structure as simple as possible.
Other possible approaches are a little more demanding. One such is being sure to design for low-end mobile devices, not just the newest and latest.
Many mobile content developers will no doubt be too young to remember the early days of the Internet before conforming to standards became commonplace. In the race to create bold and innovative sites that would exploit the potential of the new medium, many graphic designers sitting in front of 21" full-color monitors fell into the trap of building sites that looked great on 21" full-color monitors. Unfortunately many of them neglected to consider that most of the potential audience was experiencing the Web on VGA screens in 256 colors or less. A good number were still using text based browsers such as Lynx.
The unfortunate outcome was that millions of potential visitors were disenfranchised from visiting large numbers of sites. There is a similar risk in today's mobile Internet space, where developers could be tempted to neglect to test and optimize their sites for the full range of devices.
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