In the new world of digital content optimization (also called digital asset optimization by some) content can and should be optimized to make it more visible on many popular platforms, including Apple’s App Store. The few articles that I’ve seen on App Store SEO seem to focus on more black hat techniques like keyword stuffing with unrelated keywords, but there are white hat ways to get your content to the top of Apple’s App Store search engine as well. Here are a few:

Make an interesting App that doesn’t violate Apple’s guidelines. This may go without saying, but given how much attention is paid to indexing in traditional SEO, it really needs to be said. In order to be indexed in the App Store it is necessary to create an app that follows Apple’s legal and content guidelines, some of which are listed in their developer center, prior to submitting the App. At some point Apple may be more transparent on what can and cannot be included in the App Store, but until that day comes it’s helpful to review some of the reasons they’ve given for other rejected Apps, such as the notorious “Babyshaker” app this week. Once you’ve made it into the App Store, follow the next nine steps to make your interesting app visible, and you could end up promoted by Apple in television commercials, and eventually listed as one of the most downloaded apps of all time.

Keep an eye on the Top 50. Apple makes no secret which of its applications are most popular. Savvy app developers can understand what types of content are popular among app store users simply by browsing the top 50 apps in iTunes on a regular basis. Having similar or better content than a popular iPhone app could help the app piggyback off of traffic for a related app. Though it’s sure to change, here are keywords for some of the most popular apps in the App Store’s internal search on April 24, 2009. Understanding what keywords and content Apple is trying to promote can help marketers get a sense of whether the app that they’re building will make the top 50 eventually.

Integrate Facebook Connect. Facebook has consistently been one of the most popular Apps in the App Store since it first appeared. By integrating Facebook Connect into its iPhone app, the popular Scrabble application now appears in searches for Facebook, which is most likely a very popular search term in the App Store. By making your app social with Facebook Connect, you’re helping to make the app viral, while aligning your content with what is historically one of the most popular apps in the store. For certain apps (like Brickbreaker), just mentioning their Facebook fan page is enough to get them included in the search results.

Use keywords in the app name. The name of the app is the title tag of App Store apps—perhaps the most important on-page ranking factor of the App Store search engine. Users entering the keyword “fun” in the app store search box will find a tip calculator listed prominently among the other apps that are apparently fun. Is this because the tip calculator is inherently more fun than Bejeweled 2, Catcha Mouse or the other popular game apps that are listed below it? It’s more likely that the tip calculator is listed because it included the keyword “fun” in the name of the app. If developers think their application is also fun, they can alert the search engine to this fact by placing the keyword in the name of the app, and help themselves appear higher in the search results for informational queries.

Encourage users to write reviews. Popularity seems to be a big component of visibility in the App Store, and that includes user reviews. I don’t know how big a role they play in the ranking algorithm of the search engine, but some have noticed that developers are gaming reviews in order to be more visible in the App Store. White hats can participate in this as well. Wherever you promote your app, mention high user ratings and encourage people who download the app to write reviews.

Mention popular related apps in body copy. Some less scrupulous marketers have seen the value of keyword stuffing in promoting apps, but this can be done in an ethical way as well. If there is a popular app that is relevant to your app, mentioning it in the copy will help your app show up for navigational searches for those popular apps, thus increasing visibility for relevant searches.

Use old-style keyword density in body copy. The App Store search engine is not a Google killer, meaning it seems to be fairly unsophisticated in how it ranks content, in a way that’s similar to the search engines that existed before Google. In some cases, having the keyword in the name of the developer appears to help rankings considerably on some fairly competitive phrases. The rule for white hats is still to write for users, not just users of search engines, but it helps to be aware of your keyword use. Don’t overuse the keyword, but “overuse” for Google and “overuse” for the App Store are clearly two different things entirely. Liberal keyword usage will not hurt you in the App Store at present, so don’t be afraid to make it clear (without spamming) which keywords your app is relevant for.

Promote the App with your web content. If you have a web presence with a lot of traffic, an email list, a Twitter following or paid search campaign, by all means use them to promote your app. Popularity is really the key to visibility in this app store, so the more opportunities you have to make a user aware of your app the better. Link directly to the app in the iTunes store from your home page and a separate app page on your site and make it easy for the user to download for quick conversion.

Offer a lite version of a paid app. When looking at the keyword frequency of the 228 unique keywords in the App Store search suggest today, by far the most popular were “lite” and “free”. Many developers are offering no-cost versions of their paid apps and calling them “lite.” This allows users to get some exposure to the app before committing to a purchase, and allows marketers to get in front of a potential consumer they wouldn’t have reached otherwise. If you have a lite app, use the words “free” and “lite” in the name and description of the site to get more exposure to your brand. This also gives marketers one more listing when someone is searching for relevant but not branded content.

Alert relevant communities. Popularity is almost everything in the App Store, and if you have a great app that you think people will like, waiting for people to find it in the App Store is not ideal. Along the same lines as encouraging users to write reviews, marketers can find many communities devoted to iPhone Apps that can help spread the word, including these eight:

• http://iphoneapplicationlist.com/submit-iwidget/ http://www.iphoneappreviews.net/
• http://www.appleiphoneschool.com/
• http://www.whatsoniphone.com/
• http://iphone.iusethis.com/
• http://www.viewpoints.com/Software?N=4294554711
• http://www.appvee.com/
• http://www.appstoreapps.com/

The issue usually comes down to one of the following related arguments:

iPhone killed the mobile web. With this argument, “mobile web” usually means WAP pages made for simple users. iPhone and other smartphone users have the ability to access full HTML web pages, and search engines on mobile devices will often show these to mobile users, so there’s no mobile specific content to index and rank. Hence, optimizing for mobile users specifically (which historically involves WAP pages and a dotMobi domain) is a waste of time.

SEO is SEO. Best practices for mobile SEO are best practices in general web SEO, and vice versa. Title tags, keywords, links and accessibility is going to be the same for search engines serving mobile users as it will be for desktop users. There’s nothing inherently different about SEO for mobile users.

However, I would argue just the opposite.

iPhone birthed the mobile web

First, the iPhone did not kill the mobile web. Quite the opposite, it made mobile searching and browsing nearly mainstream. In July of last year Nielsen Mobile declared that the mobile web had reached critical mass, in part because of the growth of smartphone usage, including iPhone. Kelsey group and others have said the same: smartphone adoption drives mobile web usage. Though there are fewer smartphone users in general, those users are the most active searchers, with Google reporting 50 times the search requests from iPhones than from any other device.

Proponents of the first argument seem to understand that smartphones drive usage, but argue that users are not looking for mobile-specific content, but for content in general. Making a desktop site accessible to simple users then, or desktop SEO best practices, will make a site indexed and ranked by search engines that serve content to mobile users, including market leader Google. This gets into the second argument-the argument put forth in the Sitepoint article and countless others—that SEO best practices done once will make a site findable by desktop and mobile users.

This is not a myth, but the truth. SEO best practices will generally make a site accessible to smartphone searchers. And if accessibility is optimization, then I suppose that for you mobile SEO will be obsolete. However, just because something is accessible does not mean that it’s optimized. In search, pages are indexed before they are ranked, so accessibility is an important first step; but it’s not an end game. If good enough is acceptable to you, then make your desktop content accessible to simple users and you should be ok for mobile search. But you won’t be optimized, and you may not be prepared for the future of search.

Mobile SEO is not desktop SEO

In order for a page to appear for relevant searches, the content must be optimized for those searches. This becomes problematic in mobile search, as multiple studies by search engines have shown that mobile search behavior differs from desktop search behavior in frequency, category and intent. In other words, mobile searchers have a different context than mobile users, and thus search differently. In order to account for these mobile searches, a marketer will have to use mobile specific tools like Google’s mobile keyword tool instead of desktop keyword tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. Doing keyword research for mobile users is mobile SEO, and it’s relevant today for both mobile sites and desktop sites that want to be more relevant to mobile users. As long as searchers continue to enter different queries on mobile devices, mobile keyword research and content optimization-one aspect of mobile SEO that is not covered by desktop SEO—will not become obsolete.

With the understanding that mobile searches are searching differently, the easiest, most effective way for a webmaster to make her site relevant to mobile searchers is to create mobile-specific content that is tightly-themed for relevant mobile searches. It’s not absolutely necessary at this point, but it could make a site more competitive for mobile searches than a site that doesn’t consider the mobile user experience.

Competitiveness of mobile search results is one point that I think the question of mobile SEO’s obsolescence hinges on. Right now desktop results and mobile search results are not wildly different, especially if you access the mobile web search results through an iPhone or iPod Touch (app results are another matter entirely). However, Google representatives have often been quoted in the press as being on focused on improving mobile search results (including Vint Cerf at his recent SMX keynote), and a Google patent from last year reveals one way in which they could improve mobile search results that would change the mobile SEO game entirely: blended mobile search results.

Nadir Garouche reviewed it in detail on his SEO principle blog, so I won’t detail it here. However, the gist of it is that Google would improve a page’s quality score (and ranking) based on whether signals indicated that the content was mobile in nature. In other words, they described a desktop ranking algorithm, and a mobile specific algorithm, and described how the two would interact based on the perceived nature of the query. Mobile specific signals and desktop specific signals to me indicates that Google recognizes that mobile search users have different goals, and need different content based on those goals.

The goal of mobile SEO in the long term, and why I think it will become, not obsolete, but more relevant, is to concentrate on these mobile-specific signals and their relative importance in the mobile user experience. There are signals that seem more important for mobile users than desktop users, but there are also signals that affect only mobile search results. I found 22 mobile-specific signals of the 50+ mobile indexing and ranking factors that I’m aware of that are not only mobile-specific, but have no equivalent in desktop SEO. In the future there may be even more.

Mobile specific queries and signals are the major reasons that mobile SEO will be around in some form for a while. As the search engines are figuring out how to best serve mobile users, white hat SEOs are going to have to evolve with them in order to understand how to best connect mobile queries to mobile content. I think the real question many people are asking when they’re asking if mobile SEO is going to be obsolete is “Should I include mobile SEO in my budget, and if so why?” This is a related, but as I see it, fundamentally different question. More on this in a future column, but the answer to the question at hand is an emphatic no. As mobile users grow, and search engines figure out how to return better, more relevant results based on their context, the conversation will not be about WAP pages and low-end browsers, just as desktop SEO is no longer about low-quality directory links; but it will still be about mobile SEO.