While it is always growing, smartphone ownership at the end of 2011 was still at only 30% for people in the 55-65 age group, and less than 18% for people 65 and older.

On the other side of the age spectrum, only 38% of 13 to 17 year olds owned a smartphone. If you are doing mobile marketing or even mobile SEO, you can’t just assume that everyone owns a smartphone.

Some Age Groups Are Still Slower to Adopt Smartphone Technology than Others

Doing a good job for WAP is not something I talk much about, because for the most part in the US the big money transactions seem to happen on smartphones, (unless you are selling loads of ringtones or J2ME games, which is totally different because you are working in such volume.)

When you are creating a WAP site with SEO rankings in mind, it is much more about facilitating loyalty and brand affinity than creating a flashy user interface. It is about staying available, and a bit about embracing your less tech-savvy customers.

For sites that need to have mass appeal like news, weather and health sites, it still may be valuable to provide a WAP site that can allow visitors to complete simple mobile tasks and micro-conversions like finding a store location, signing up for an email program or opting into an SMS campaign.

There is a lower chance that they will benefit from Google’s new smartphone crawler so WAP sites may still have to compete algorithmically against the other pages on the site. They may have to stand on their own, and rank well in Google’s WAP (Mobile-Only) Index.

So let’s talk about what it takes to rank in Google’s WAP index. Here is a sample search for ‘cute puppies’ on a generic smartphone, and a generic feature phone (WAP phone):

Cute Puppies Search Results on WAP Phones and SmartPhones

And here are the top desktop results, for your reference:

Compare the Mobile Search Results to this Desktop Search Result for 'cute puppies.'

The first thing that you will notice in all of the results is the cute puppies! The second thing you will notice is that the smartphone results are much more ‘interesting’ because they include lots of Universal results for images and videos.

On the feature phone side it is much blander, but you will see that there are YouTube videos ranking 1^st through 4^th but do not include thumbnail images for the video listings. Only two of those four videos are present on in the smartphone results, but they at least have thumbnail previews with them on the smartphone.

Some of the results are the similar, but there are differences not only in the rankings and inclusion of Universal Results, but also in which sites are there, and which sites are totally missing.

TheDailyPuppy.com ranks 1^st in the smartphone results, but is not listed at all in the feature phone results; same with CutePuppies.net, ranking 2^nd on the smartphone results but not at all on the feature phone results.

Conversely, articles from Glamour, the Sun and Racked all rank in the feature phone results but are nowhere to be seen in the smartphone results. Also, an Amazon eBook about cute puppies ranks 6^th in the feature phone results, but not at all in the Smartphone results. Other than 2 of the 4 YouTube videos and CuteOverload.com, the websites included in the two result sets are actually totally different. (OMG!)

So What Can We Learn?

• YouTube is your friend in mobile search results – both smartphone and feature phone; (especially if the videos are from 2006-weird! (Have there really been no awesome cute puppy videos since 2006?) This is not a mobile phenomenon though; those same videos are ranking in the desktop search too).
• Feature phone users will rely more heavily on accurate title and description tags because there are no images or intentions to distract them. Have a look at the description tags (snippets) on the YouTube videos. You will see that they are not pulled through on the smartphone results but they are on feature phone results, and if you forget them you just look silly (see results 3 and 4 on feature phone)!
• The YouTube results on both phones seem to rely very heavily on the exact match of the keyword queries in the title tag. Only one of the YouTube results has a word other than ‘cute puppy’ or ‘cute puppies.’
• Image results perform really well in smartphone results, but not as well, or at all in feature phone results. This could be because Google Images has updated how their image results display on smartphones, and this technology & code may be too sophisticated or heavy for most WAP phones.
• Facebook landing pages appear to rank better on smartphones than feature phones. My guess is that social pages will become increasingly important in all mobile results, but currently they are not hitting the radar of the feature phone using puppy lovers.
• Having formatted dates appears to be more important in the feature phone results (see the last 4 results), but having keywords in the domain name seems to be much more important in smartphone results (4/10) than feature phone results (0/10).

I had a look, and it is really hard to tell why CuteOverload.com did so well and was the only site other than YouTube to show up in both sets of results. It is a blog with really long pages, covered with huge images and some videos, so it does not seem like a good feature phone result to me. Perhaps like the news stories, it is being given a slight boost because it is in a blog templates with lots of dates?

Obviously this is just one search, and we would have to do many more searches to really know these things for sure, but you will find that the inclusion of Universal listings in mobile search results varies by industry and the propensity for a search to trigger certain types of Universal Results. It should serve as a good reminder to check to see how search results vary on mobile phones as you consider your mobile search strategy.

Al was at the talk in Sydney and let me know that the smartphone bot had visited some of the sites he is responsible for and told me about the initial results. Mantra.com.au is the site we discussed most; iPhones and Androids are now showing the mobile-optimized urls instead of desktop urls in some (not all) searches.

While I am writing this case study up, Al gets most of the credit for his keen observations about the behavior of the bot and its impact on search results. As it may be useful to have a short case study out there, we’ll review the specific case of the smartphone bot, and how its indexing has played out in the Mantra mobile crawling, indexing and ranking.

Keep in mind this is just one site, and other sites may have different experiences with the smartphone bot, but here is what Al and now I have observed thus far.

Smartphone Bot Crawling

As I alluded above, I have done lots of research to see which sites are being affected and which are not. Many of the large sites do not appear to be showing evidence of the smartphone bot yet.

This includes sites like Facebook, Amazon and YouTube, which all still show ‘www’ desktop urls in searches from Androids and iPhones. Either the bot is crawling them and not indexing the mobile content, or perhaps I am not doing the right tests, to generate the mobile results (more on that later).

One of the most interesting aspects of this case study is that Mantra.com.au was crawled by the smartphone bot in early December, according to Al, slightly before the new bot was even announced (sneaky Google!). Al explained that their content has always been crawled quite regularly, and that they did not do anything special like submit a sitemap for the mobile subdomain or set up any special robots instructions, except to disallow content that did not belong in results at all.

The Mantra site is using conditional 302’s to redirect mobile traffic from the desktop pages to their mobile counterparts. Note that 302’s are much less common in traditional SEO, but very common in mobile user-agent detection and redirection, but a 301 would be fine as well.

The mobile optimized urls do not appear to be exact mirrors of each other, though they do match up in the final element of the file name; for instance, a vacation property in Sydney on Bond Street has the following two urls and meta data:

Desktop Url: http://www.mantra.com.au/new-south-wales/sydney-and-surrounds/sydney/accommodation/hotels/mantra-2-bond-street/

Desktop Title Tag: Mantra 2 Bond Street | Sydney Hotels | New South Wales NSW

Desktop Description Tag: The hotel is centrally located close to Sydney attractions such as the Sydney Opera House, Pitt Street Mall, Darling Harbour and The Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mobile Url: http://m.mantra.com.au/buildings/mantra-2-bond-street

Mobile Title Tag: Mantra 2 Bond Street Sydney NSW

Mobile Description Tag: NONE

Interestingly, the desktop title tag and description tags are still present in the mobile ranking, and so far, the only thing that has changed is the replacement of the desktop page url with the mobile page url as shown below.

This is not exactly what Google had promised in the announcement and description of how the bot worked:

Smartphone Bot Mixes Desktop & Mobile Page Info in the SERP

The crawler is relying almost 100% on the 302 redirect without additional signals of affiliation between the desktop page and the corresponding home page. Mantra is linking back to the desktop site with a text link at the bottom of every page, which uses cookies to stick the user to the desktop site, but it is a page-to-homepage link.

This is great, (and obviously good enough for Google) but it might not provide users or engines as much value as a page-to-page link could in the long term. Also, Mantra is not using canonical tags to help associate the mobile versions of the pages to their desktop counterparts.

Al really did a great job maximizing the crawl efficiency on the mobile site by minimizing DUST (duplicate url, same text). Here is what he told me:

“I’ve worked very closely with our in-house developers to minimize unnecessary redirects within the site & every iteration we’re dropping more & more where possible. We’re handling duplicate content using redirects and have currently handled URL casing (force lower case), protocol (can only view a URL in the intended protocol, but need to get that changed to a 301 as its currently a 302) and I’m waiting on another small update to strip trailing slashes via a 301 as well.”

Al also mentioned that he has made sure that the developers were eliminating unnecessary redirects and keeping the mobile code clean and light. He wins the gold medal here because this will all really ensure that all of his mobile and desktop content will be crawled and indexed without slowing the bots down – which is exactly what has happened.

Mantra Group is also using user agent detection to deliver a low-fi version of their mobile websites, allowing visitors using less capable smartphone devices to transact online instead of simply saying “your device isn’t supported”.

Smartphone Bot Indexing

While this has not been stated outright, there has been no mention of a new smartphone index, and historical Google mobile rankings indicate that they think that it is perfectly acceptable to rank and serve desktop pages to smartphone searchers.

This is also in-line with the recent history of Google updates, in which Google appears to be trying to speed up the delivery of their SERPs by not having to query multiple indexes, but instead tagging all entries in one index with specific ‘Universal’ ranking information – exactly what happened with the launch of Caffeine in June of 2010. (Why the separate mobile WAP index still exists is up for debate, but will be covered in another blog post.)

As far as we know, the new smartphone bot is just attaching alternate mobile attributes and meta data to pages that exist in the desktop index.

In the case that smartphone-optimized pages exist without desktop counterparts, these pages are also getting added to the primary Google index, with mobile indicators, to hopefully prevent them from appearing in desktop search results (or at least, that is what has been implied by Google).

Al explained that the mobile-optimized urls on Mantra.com.au were not showing up in ALL searches, and this he supposed was related to the nature of the redirects and the quality of the pages. In his own words:

“What is interesting is that not all URLs that we have specific redirects for seem to show the optimized URL & I’m not quite sure what the driver for that is. I was thinking that maybe Google have a quality signal associated to whether or not they’ll optimize the URL or not. For example, we use the same breadcrumb markup throughout our site but not all sections of our site show breadcrumbs in the search results – which I assume is a quality/link signal not being strong enough for those particular sections of our sites & I was thinking maybe the same sort of thing exists for mobile optimized URLs”

It could also be that not all of the pages have been crawled and indexed by the new smartphone bot, or some other less obvious problem that the smartphone bot found with the redirect, the content or the similarity of the two pages. Illustrations of the differences in indexing are included below.

A Page Affected By The Smartphone Bot

Where the desktop page used to be, the mobile page now ranks in its place. The link goes directly to the mobile property page without needing to be redirected. The listing shows the Desktop Title Tag and Description, but the mobile page url.

The smartphone listing links directly to the mobile optimized page

 A Page Not Affected By The Smartphone Bot

The desktop page is requested from the search result, but the server redirects to the mobile home page because there is not mobile page that is a direct match to this desktop page.

The listing that shows the desktop site is redirected to the mobile home page

Smartphone Bot Ranking

The most interesting thing about the activity and rankings of the smartphone bot crawl is that the results are not universal across the site, and appear to be keyword dependent.

Generic iPhone and Android queries on the brand name or brand+product were still returning the desktop home page url. The category and top level pages did not yet have a corresponding mobile page, so it makes sense for them, but the homepage did have a corresponding mobile page, so this was a bit odd.

In Al’s words:

“While we’re obviously redirecting our desktop home page to the mobile home page, none of our primary brand terms produce an optimised URL for the home page. ….At the moment, I have specific redirects in place for the ‘property’ content and all other URLs fall back to the mobile home page. As such, you’ll get mobile optimized URLs showing for queries that return hotel content such as [mantra 2 bond st], [mantra crown towers], [mantra circle on cavill] but not a generic query like [mantra sydney] or [mantra melbourne] – unless we have a hotel page that ranks for that term as well.”

Also interesting is the changes in the mobile sitelinks, which are sometimes different between desktop and mobile queries.

Apparently, the new smartphone crawler is choosing its own sitelinks, presumably based on their perceived relevance or optimization for mobile users, and including those instead of the sitelinks that are returned in a desktop search, as shown below:

Mobile Sitelinks	Desktop Sitelinks
Site Links Differ from Mobile To Desktop

What I thought was interesting was that some of the sitelinks returned in the mobile SERP with the desktop homepage listed were to pages that did not have a mobilized version, (for instance Mantra Resorts). This also occured when a mobile url was included with sitelinks, the sitelinks did not always go to pages that had been mobilized, shown below.

Mobile Sitelinks

When in portrait mode, there was only one sitelink, but two are displayed in landscape:

One Site Link in Portrait but Two in Landscape, All to Non-Mobile Pages

Desktop Sitelinks

This time, the sitelinks are the same on mobile and desktop, except desktop has one more: 

Three Site Links for Desktop

This is totally baffling, because on one hand, it appears that the smartphone bot is changing which site links appear, but it is not doing it in a mobile-optimized way.

Here is what Al had to say about that:

“I see room for improvement from Google on this front for mobilising the breadcrumb URLs displayed in the SERPs as well. Currently the title links to the mobile URL but the breadcrumb URLs are the same as the desktop URLs, for which we don’t have mobile specific pages or redirects in place just yet. I’d be great in the future if the “Gold Coast” link in the screenshot also linked to a mobile optimized URL (when we release those URLs into the mobile sites). It is possible that could happen currently but because we don’t have those type of pages on the mobile site & therefore don’t have the redirects, the breadcrumb in the SERPs isn’t being optimized yet.”

To me, this seems like a very bad user experience, because searchers expect to be delivered to a mobilized version of the Gold Coast page (reinforced by the title, description and bread crumb trail that are all pulled in from the desktop ranking), but instead are delivered to the mobile home page, where they will not be able to find the Gold Coast page, because it has yet to be mobilized.

In this case, it would be better if Google had left the desktop page link, because at least that has the information that the searcher was looking for. Hopefully this is a glitch that will quickly be fixed!

Conclusion

So that is the data. It does seem like the smartphone bot is a bit quirky, and there are a lot of odd things that are going on. It is odd that the smartphone bot is affecting sites like Mantra.com.au before sites like Facebook and Twitter. Odd that it is not updating home page urls in mobile search results, and results more likely generated by long-tail searches than generics. It’s also odd that it is changing sitelinks but not to make them direct people to pages that are mobile friendly.

Perhaps the new smartphone bot is on vacation somewhere in Australia, relaxing before full-on, logical deployment, but we will have to wait and find out. If you have interesting experiences, or similar experiences, please post them in the comments – we would love to hear them!

Google is still detecting what handset users are searching from, and adapting the results that they send based on the handset; some phones are set up to pull from the desktop index using mobile indicators and phone-specific ranking factors. Other phones will trigger the mobile-only index that has been in play for a long time, serving mostly feature phones, older HTC and Windows Mobile phones and BlackBerrys.

The image below shows the top mobile search results for the query ‘Taylor Swift’ on an iPhone 4, a BlackBerry Curve and a DROID Incredible. The tool allows you to scroll through the results, but we are only looking at what shows above the fold on the search. Try your own keyword searches here, using the mobile search simulator tool.

See the Differences of Search Results on Different Phones

If you look closely, you can see that both the BlackBerry and the DROID Incredible are showing the same first result, which is a bio page on CMT.com, but the iPhone is showing the Official Taylor Swift website first, and a news story from MTV after that.

The next results on the BlackBerry and the Droid Incredible are both a bio page on Last.FM and then TicketMaster concert dates, a music video on YouTube and then Amazon.com for a CD or MP3 purchase.

Conversely, the next results on the iPhone are from Wikipedia, IMDB, MTV and MySpace. It is only after MySpace that you see CMT Artist Profile page on the iPhone, though ranks first on the BlackBerry and Droid Incredible. Rounding out the results on the iPhone, you get a run of social media inclusions, with 2 YouTube videos, Twitter and Facebook, and the last result is TaylorSwiftWeb.net.

When you look at the end of the BlackBerry and Droid Incredible results, after Amazon,  you see VH1, Twitter, Celebrity Gossip.net Buzworthy.mtv.com and m.Zimbio.com, which is another celebrity biography site.

While it does appear that the BlackBerry and the DROID Incredible are getting the same results, they are not 100% the same because of a difference in the ‘Related Searches’ at the bottom of the page.

On the BlackBerry, there are only four related searches included (taylor swift songs, taylor swift biography, taylor swift lyrics, taylor swift albums), but on the DROID Incredible, there are eight (taylor swift songs, taylor swift biography, taylor swift lyrics, taylor swift albums, taylor swift twitter, taylor swift quotes, taylor swift tour, taylor swift wardrobe malfunction). This change could be related to the phone, or it could be a fluke, or perhaps Google is just testing something.

None of the results on the iPhone are from pages on an ‘m.’ or ‘/m’ and I checked to see if the new smartphone bot was honoring mobile redirects on these pages, and it did not appear to have had an effect yet, except for the Wikipedia listing and IMDB. MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, MTV, CMT and even YouTube still did not appear to be effected by the ‘honoring of mobile redirects’ that the new smartphone bot claims.

When you switch from the iPhone to the other two more WAP-like phones, which appear to be pulling from the WAP index, only one of the results on the BlackBerry or the DROID Incredible was on mobile subdomains or subdirectories, though most do include a little green phone that indicates that the page is somehow mobile friendly (ie: Google’s mobile bot could successfully crawl it.)

It is important to know that search results can change from phone to phone, but also that the inclusions and page templates can change too. Different searches trigger different kinds of results, but having content on an ‘m.’ or having user-agent detection and redirection is not the only way to rank in a mobile search.

It appears that the new smartphone bot only has limited deployment so far, so be watching for it in your log files, in the coming months. It still has lots of big sites and social networks to crawl, but it makes sense that eventually we will see a wider deployment of the bot, so you can hopefully expect it to be by, indexing your mobile redirects – hopefully in the next couple months, after it is done with Twitter and Facebook.

In theory, as long as you have strong rankings for your desktop pages on mobile phones, then your mobile pages should soon be benefiting from those rankings, as long as page-to-page mobile redirects are in place.

But that begs the question – what about feature phones?

When you live in a tech-savvy community like most of us do, it is sometimes hard to remember that not everyone has smartphones. In fact, some studies in the US still showed that in June 2011, more than 50% of subscribers had yet to upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone (See the colorful graph below.)

There are still lots of Feature Phones in the US, but are those people searching?

Conventional wisdom and studies published by other groups all indicate that feature phone users are much less interested in mobile search than smartphone users are. Though it may be irrelevant for many mobile marketers, WAP still has a place in the marketing mix, and there are still some sites that are targeted at driving WAP traffic.

This new smartphone bot creates a conundrum for mobile SEO, because now we know much more about how smartphone rankings are controlled (or will be controlled as the smartphone bot is more widely deployed), but we are still left in the dark about how the search rankings on feature phones are derived.

Most SEO’s don’t realize that Google still maintains a separate index of mobile sites. In fairness, the WAP or mobile-only index has been getting increasingly harder to access.

History lesson:

You used to access it simply by going to m.google.com until they added the mobile dropdown, and m.google.com began to default to showing smartphone results. Finally m.google.com turned into a landing page promoting all of Google’s mobile product offerings, and the mobile search engine was moved to .google.com/m, with the dropdown for mobile-only or WAP phone results or sometimes, just the text link options of ‘mobile’ and ‘classic’ at the bottom of the search page.

All very confusing, but now to get to the WAP index, you basically have to have a WAP phone, know the generic WAP phone search parameters (covered later) or use MobileMoxie’s free mobile search engine indexing tool.

Comparing Mobile Search Results Side By Side

Below is a picture that compares site indexing for m.cmt.com (with no geo-data) on a desktop, smartphone and WAP phone. What you will notice is that the desktop and smartphone results are identical, but the WAP results have different pages included, with a different order, and even a different SERP template:

The URL for the results in the WAP index (furthest on the right) looks like this:

http://www.google.com/m/search?q=site:m.sears.com/&site=mobile

Notice that there are two mobile references in this URL – the first one is the mobile subdomain (/m/) and the second one is a parameter from the drop down, that says ‘&site=mobile’. That is how you know you are looking at the WAP index, a.k.a. the mobile-only index.

If there is just a /m/ then you are basically looking at smartphone results, which pull from the desktop index, which then use adapted ranking factors and a different page template.

Aside from the mobile domain that we are checking, the URL for the smartphone search results only has one mobile reference in the query, and looks like this:

http://www.google.com/m?q=site:m.sears.com/

One of the first things you will notice that is different between the WAP results on the far right, and the desktop and smart phone indexes to the left of it, is that there are session ID’s indexed, even on the home page of the WAP results.

After the homepage, the second page that is indexed for the desktop and smartphone index is the page for the ‘Kardashian Kollection,’ [sic] but the second page included in the WAP index results is one called ‘shc/s/dap-….‘

You can tell from the title tag that the page is actually for the Kardashian Kollection, but a different version of the URL is clearly indexed here. The following pages are all the same, but this is a clear indication of a disassociation in the two indexes.

Here is another interesting example, where you will notice that there are much more dramatic differences in the indexing of the mobile content – more specifically, that mobile content is only partially indexed in the desktop and smartphone index:

Just the homepage and the login page are accessible to the desktop and smartphone crawlers on this site, because eBay has chosen to block the desktop bots from accessing their mobile content.

Though they have no special treatment of the new smartphone bot on their mobile pages, they are actually blocking indexing of their mobile content by the desktop version of Google-bot (it is actually a bit unclear how those two pages that are indexed got there at all, based on the robots.txt file!):

eBay Mobile Robots.txt Blocks Desktop Indexing

The mobile version of Sears, and some other sites we checked that had very similar indexing across all devices had no mobile specific robots instructions, and appeared to suggest no other special treatment for the mobile pages (for instance, with canonical tags or robots instructions in the meta tags).

The launch of the new Google smartphone bot does appear to have impacted some of the mobile-only WAP indexing in a subtle way, making it appear more like the desktop and smartphone indexes, unless the pages are specifically treated differently.

It will certainly be interesting to see if the WAP phone index is preserved, or if it is eventually melded with the desktop and smartphone index. It does seem to be getting some well needed updates; but it is still off there on its own. With no clarification (yet) from Google Mobile, we are left to wonder what will become of it, and how it may or may not be impacted by the new smartphone bot in the future.

One of the coolest things about mobile social networking is the open nature of the networks themselves. Most of the social networks that have a mobile component use APIs to pull in vital information from other profiles and push out updates across multiple networks (like pulling your Tweets into Facebook, or adding all your Twitter friends to FourSqure). This means users don’t have to create full social profiles to interact across a wide variety of social networks, and if they are “mobile” it means less typing with their thumbs. It also means one update can reach a variety of friends on a variety of social networks very quickly and easily. This is a stroke of genius for the social networks, and also really good for your marketing campaign.

Obligatory statistics

While consistent statistics are hard to come by in the mobile world, all of the reporting agencies are noting tremendous growth in the use of social networks on smart phones and feature phones, through the use of downloadable applications or through the browser and text messaging. In March of this year comScore released a study that compared mobile social networking usage from January 2009 to January 2010. While MySpace showed minor losses (-7%), the use of Facebook from mobile phones grew 112% and the use of Twitter grew an astounding 347%.

Some studies show that social networking is the most common behavior on a smart phone after text messaging, outpacing even email and mobile web search. It makes sense that social networking would be such a popular activity on a phone, because the primary purpose of a phone has almost always been to enable “social” behavior. Interestingly enough, it appears that mobile social engagement also indicates that a person is over-all more engaged in social networking; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that the average Facebook mobile user is on average 50% more active than the general Facebook user. This may indicate that the people we reach with mobile social networking are key influencers in their social circle, which can be incredibly powerful for building brand awareness and loyalty.

Lo-So: Be there or be square

Local-Social Networking, otherwise known as “lo-so” (coined by Martin Bowling), is the next big frontier in digital marketing. If you haven’t noticed, “checking-in” is what all the cool kids are doing now. It started with people Tweeting their location and telling people to meet them there. Then it evolved into GPS-informed check-ins through twitter clients. That led to people checking in through FourSquare and Gowalla, where you could earn badges or mayorships for visiting the same location and checking-in. In the past month, Yelp has added similar functionality, and Facebook has also announced plans to integrate its own mobile check-in system (along with a new event system… hummm). Pretty soon, even the not-so-cool kids will be “checking-in” and this social activity is decidedly “mobile.”

The friendly competition created by these hyper-local status updates was fun but it needed more, so FourSquare got hip and added some stuff to reward the behavior: the ability for businesses to automatically reward their most loyal customers with in-store discounts, and the ability for business to track and statistically evaluate their customers (FourSquare for business). The platform gives marketers an astoundingly deep view into the behavior of anyone who checks-in to their location. They can learn who is visiting and how often, where the visitors are coming from, where they might be going next, and with the use of redemption code tracking, what they are buying and which offers drive the most offline sales.

Facebook has yet to monetize mobile traffic with advertising, so pay close attention: I believe that addition of the local-check in functionality and possibly some integration with the new events pages means that it is about to monetize mobile—and that will change everything! The potential for an uber-personal marketing experience is right there in the data that mobile users still willingly give up! With the information from a social profile, information from friends’ profiles, and historical check-ins, marketers could get a very clear picture of the people that they are marketing to, and hopefully use it to provide them highly relevant and actionable offers. (Also watch out for the inevitable new Facebook privacy scandal to correspond with this launch).

While this deep level of information and tracking is terrifying for some, I think it is exciting. Mobile marketing puts a direct response into real-life, and makes it trackable. It is important to note that in March, Google secured a patent to deliver location-based advertising that will apparently use location for “targeting, setting a minimum price bid for an ad, offering performance analytics and modifying the content of an ad.” It’s clear that this type of hyper-local digital marketing is going to become a reality, and an understanding of the current mobile environment online will be a key ingredient to success.

So what are the tricks to using social networks as conduits for mobile marketing? It is simpler than you think.

Effectively using social networks for mobile gains

The first step is to set-up, optimize and link all your branded accounts. After that, here is how you can use some of the more mobile-focused social networks to do some simple mobile marketing.

Twitter: According to some statistics, between 70 and 80% of worldwide Twitter use occurs on a mobile phone. So if you have a Twitter strategy, you really need a mobile strategy too. Consider occasionally treating Twitter like an SMS gateway and treating your list of Twitter followers a bit more like a list of opted-in phone numbers (they opted in when they followed you on Twitter).

What text message would you send to all of your customers if you could send it right now? Why not send it over Twitter instead? Twitter is free, and your most loyal users are already opted-in. You could send out reminders for sales and special events. Even better, send out promotion codes that can be redeemed for in-store discounts. You could even send out links to mobile coupons or flyers (these can simply be small digital coupons with their own web address or simple html pages with redemption codes and instructions). If you have the technology in your locations, you could also include links to scanable bar codes that people can carry on their phone, and scan them in the store.

If coupons and discount codes aren’t your thing, you could even Tweet links to downloadable mobile content, like applications, games, videos, wallpapers and ringtones. Just be sure you give your followers enough information to generate a good user experience—if you are Tweeting a link to your Android application, make sure that is clear in the Tweet, so iPhone users don’t click on it and get confused.

If you are careful, Twitter automation tools can really help brands that are trying to actively engage a huge user-base on Twitter. An easy way to start is simply to set up an auto-responder that will send anyone who follows your brand a direct message with a link to a mobile coupon, in-store redemption code or a link to your mobile site. If you have phone bank or call center you can even Tweet phone numbers for call-in contests or telethons—when phone numbers appear on someone’s phone, they are immediately clickable, just like web links.

If you already have an SMS system in place, there is no reason you shouldn’t be using Twitter to promote it. If you have an SMS alert system, there is no reason not to Tweet “Text ‘ALERT’ to 12345 to sign up for our mobile alerts” every now and then. Or you could even “Text ‘WIN’ to receive a mobile coupon, only valid today.” This is a great way to build up your opt-in list quickly. You can re-use the keywords that you use to prompt responses in other mobile campaigns, or change them so it is easier to know exactly what drove the sign-up. For example, have users text “keyword1″ when you give them the prompt through Twitter, and “keyword2″ when you prompt from a print ad. Just be careful not to do this too much, or you will risk being banned by Twitter.

FourSquare: As discussed above, there are some obvious marketing applications in FourSquare to gain massive insights about your visitors. This model is great for coffee shops, restaurants and museums, but what if you want to be more creative? You could use FourSquare as the foundation for mobile-based competitions, races and scavenger hunts that range from simple to complex.

Here is a great example: Jimmy Choo used the FourSquare platform to launch a new line of Jimmy Choo sneakers. The campaign was called CatchAChoo, and it got a lot of media attention. Before the launch of the new sneaker line, Jimmy Choo set up a profile for a pair of the sneakers, and built followers. The sneakers would check in to various locations around London (usually coffee shops,) and were left in a Jimmy Choo bag for the first follower who showed up to find and keep. People ended up watching the account closely, and racing all over London to be the first to show-up and claim the free pre-release shoes. This is a mobile social marketing campaign that required no knowledge of mobile marketing, and no mobile SMS platform. It simply used the mobile phone as a means of driving the social interaction.

Facebook: Whenever possible, (and until there is something new) you should be using Facebook like a social network aggregator, pulling in all your activities from Twitter, FourSquare, YouTube, Flickr and your blog. It is great for your mobile and non-mobile fans, and according to several measurement agencies, there are actually more mobile Facebook users worldwide than total Twitter users on all platforms.

So, if your website is not mobile friendly, start paying more attention to your Facebook fan page. While fan pages don’t work on most of the mobile applications (yet), they do work on the mobile versions of the website (m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com), when people access your site from a mobile browser. Fan pages will also eventually make it to the text-based 0.facebook.com (Facebook Zero), which just launched with free Facebook access on 50 carriers, in 45 countries worldwide, mostly focusing on developing countries. This service is provided as part of an agreement between the mobile carriers and Facebook, to allow everyone to access the social network from their web-enabled phones, even if they don’t have a data plan.

Facebook fan pages are like mini-websites for the highly-engaged, and Facebook will automatically make them mobile on the “m.” subdomain. They can be accessed from the web interface and can rank in mobile search results (though there is lots of room for improvement with the mobile SEO of these pages). Chances are that Facebook fan pages will be more integrated in mobile apps soon, and they will be like a free mobile brochure. Until then, people can “like” your profile, write on your wall, Link to Facebook notes and see photos from the fan page all from m.facebook.com or from touch.facebook.com.

If you have coupons, in-store redemption codes or mobile downloads of any kind, this is another great place to feature them with images and links. If you have a mobile application, include screen shots in your photo albums, and link to it from your fan page; if you have a store locator that will work on a mobile phone, you should be linking to it from your fan page too. Maps, phone numbers and anything that will help people interact with your brand when they are mobile are great here. If you have important articles that are not mobile friendly, link to them from Facebook then cross-post them on your Facebook fan page as notes, and they will automatically be mobilized.

If you have lots of updates that are relevant or valuable to a mobile audience, encourage users to click the “subscribe via SMS” button, so that they will get your Facebook updates sent to their mobile phone as text messages. Otherwise, just be sure integrate the mobile-friendly content on your Facebook fan page by linking to it from Twitter and other mobile-focused social network, or from your website.

So what have we learned?

The moral of the story is this: You don’t necessarily need to invest heavily in mobile technology to start reaching mobile customers. Mobile, social and even local are quickly becoming deeply integrated and entrenched. Some of the top social networks have done the heavy lifting for you, and all you have to do is know how to use it and be creative. While these tricks won’t get you a full-blown mobile strategy, they are a simple way to get your feet wet and give it a try.

Since the mobile search engines are not as finely tuned as the traditional engines, they are still placing a heavy weight on a website’s mobile bounce rate, using the mobile visitors as barometers for how the website renders on their phone. This, again should reinforce the need for good mobile rendering. Here’s how you can improve mobile rankings and mobile rending of your website.

Basic mobile SEO & site architecture

One of the best things you can do to improve your mobile search results is follow traditional SEO best practices as closely as possible. While mobile bots and indexes are different from web search, things like title tags, heading tags and alt tags are still very important.

If you have done a good job on your traditional SEO, the first step is to create a secondary mobile style sheet for your traditional site, and call it “handheld.css.” This will allow you to format your existing pages for viewing on a mobile phone without having to create separate mobile content. It allows you to leverage the SEO value that you already have on your existing site without creating new pages. You can use the mobile style sheet to block things from being rendered using a “display:none” attribute in the stylesheet. Mobile phones (except iPhones) will automatically pull the “handheld” style sheet.

iPhones are bit different, and do not look for mobile “handheld” style sheets. To address this problem, you should duplicate your handheld sheet to create one that is specifically for the iPhone, and call it “iPhone.css.” Even though the iPhone is meant to render full web pages, research has shown that people still prefer mobile-formatted content on iPhones.

In some cases, mobile search engines will want to rank a traditional page, but deem it ill-suited for rendering on a mobile phone—sometimes even if it has a mobile-specific style sheet. In these cases, the mobile search engines will rank your traditional content, but “transcode” it for viewing on a mobile phone.

The transcoded version of the site is hosted on a temporary subdomain of on the search engine’s domain. In many cases, this provides an under-optimized user experience, because navigation is sometimes misplaced or broken, and single pages are broken into multiple pages for faster download. It can also be problematic for tracking the activity on your mobile site, and if anyone links to the content, the actual website may not get credit for the links. To address this concern, you must include a “no-transform” cache-control in the header for your traditional content. The no-transform designation in the cache control of the header should prevent the page from being transcoded.

The next step is to include a mobile site map. Google has a tool that can help you build a mobile sitemap. If you are using multiple markup languages, for instance XHTML and WML you should submit a separate mobile sitemap for each language that exists on the site, and include only the pages that will render in browsers that can read that type of code. Be sure to link to the mobile site map in your robots.txt file, just like you would for a traditional site map.

Submitting a mobile site map, adding the mobile style sheet and the no-transform tag should be enough to get the mobile search engines to start crawling and ranking your content. Mobile browsers are unsophisticated and networks can be slow. Another best practice to ensure that your traditional content will work on a mobile phone is to code in strict XHTML. This will give you the best chance of rendering well across the highest number of phones and browsers.

Sloppy HTML, or bad JavaScript can really cause problems on some mobile browsers and can also impact download and rendering time of pages. Making sure you have pristine code will create an efficient crawl for the mobile bots, ensuring that they index as much as possible with each visit. If the content on your traditional website is very streamlined, with small file sizes and minimal complex code like JavaScript, AJAX and Flash, this could be enough. If not, you will have to move on to the next steps.

Advanced mobile SEO and site architecture

If the pages on your traditional site don’t use external style sheets, have a large file size, sloppy code or lots of multi-media content that could have trouble rendering on mobile phones, you might need to create mobile-specific content on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory (such as www.m.yoursite.com or www.yousite.com/m). This can be problematic for SEO, because it can split your links and traffic between two sets of similar pages. In terms of usability though, it may be worth the effort.

In your mobile-specific pages, you should also use a “handheld” style sheet and the no-transform designation, but you can also re-arrange the code so that it is more suited for mobile rendering and crawling. If you have extensive top navigation, the best practice is to move it to the bottom of the page, and include jump-links to it at the top of the page. The jump-links should link to major sections of the page, or could just link to your “main content,” “main navigation,” and “contact information.” These jump links will allow people to see more of the unique content above the fold, and will also minimize the amount of scrolling a user will have to do to find information on the page.

Ideally, mobile search engines would be able to see that you have both mobile and traditional content, and would choose to rank your mobile content above your traditional content in mobile search. Unfortunately that is not the case yet. In most cases, your mobile content is competing algorithmically against your traditional content in mobile search results, even when it is on a mobile subdirectory or mobile subdomain of your existing site. The mobile content is newer, has fewer links and sometimes, less content so it may be at an algorithmic disadvantage. That said, the next step is to link between the two versions of the site.

“Browser-detection and redirection, then self selection” is the mnemonic device that I like to use to describe how mobile and traditional websites should interact. Browser detection and re-direction is a process that looks to see what browser the web visitor is using to access the site; if a mobile browser is requesting the traditional site, a PHP script seamlessly redirects the user to the mobile site. If a traditional browser is requesting the mobile site, it seamlessly redirects them to the traditional site. This is especially handy if your traditional website out-ranks your mobile website in mobile search, but it can also be handy if your mobile site happens to our rank your traditional site in traditional search—which can happen.

The self-selection part of the rhyme simply refers to the idea that you should be linking between the traditional site and the mobile site with a text link. It is important that the link goes page-to-page rather than from any page on the traditional site to the home page of the mobile site, or vice versa. The link should be on the word “mobile” or “iPhone” if you have an iPhone-specific site. This is another great signal to give the search engines that the mobile content is optimized for mobile viewing, and should rank well in mobile search results. Links should always go from the traditional site to the mobile site and vice versa, to ensure that users are able to find exactly what they are looking for.

There are important notes about placing the self-selection link on your traditional sites. I highly recommend placing it in the very upper left hand corner of the traditional page. It should be a text link with appropriate anchor text that indicates mobility, but it should also include an image of a phone with good anchor text. This is because when traditional pages render on mobile phones, in some case the right site of the page is cut off or not displayed without side-to-side scrolling. If the button is placed in the upper right hand corner of the page or at the bottom of the page, it could be totally missed.

The phone image is necessary because in many cases, mobile phones with true-web-browsers will display traditional pages that are zoomed out to such a degree that normal size text-links become too small to read; the image helps catch the users eye. When people click the link, it is best to set a cookie, so that it tells the browser to always automatically redirect to the mobile version of the site. Not all mobile phones support cookies 100% but enough do that it is worth your time to do it.

Mobile platforms and software

If you are using a platform to “mobileize” your site, there are a couple things you need to look out for, as they can have a dramatic effect on mobile SEO. Most mobile platforms simply take the existing content on your traditional page and remove all complex code and media, leaving simply text and a minimal amount of images. This is basically the same as the “transcoding” that the search engines do, though with a proprietary platform it is more customizable. The first problem with these kinds of software is that if they are web based, they may include the mobile content on a subdomain of their main domain, rather than including it on your domain. This generally looks something like: www.yourdomain.theirdomain.com. In terms of SEO, that means that you are building up their domain rather than yours, and they have all control of the hosting. Any links, traffic or rankings that your mobile content accumulates are actually accredited to their domain rather than your own.

The next problem with mobilezing software is that frequently they will create temporary or poorly optimized file names, removing any SEO value from your site architecture or from links that use your URLs as anchor text. Even if the mobile content is on your own domain, the bad file names make it highly under-optimized. When your mobile content is on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory the best bet is to always mirror your traditional site architecture. This lets you take advantage of your previous efforts, including keywords in your file structure. It also makes it much easier for developers to link between the mobile and the traditional content, and to understand what is going on.

Again, you will need to submit a mobile site map and link it from your robots.txt file. If you are putting content on a mobile subdomain, you actually need to create a separate robots.txt file and place it and the mobile site map at the root directory of your mobile subdomain. It is fine to also link from the site map in root folder of the primary domain, but it is best to do both. With this strategy your mobile-specific content should be pared-down and optimized enough that it will out-rank the traditional site in searches on less sophisticated phones. In searches on smart phones, your traditional site is more likely to rank, but the browser detection and redirection should ensure that mobile users still get to the correct content. If you use this strategy, you actually provide a good user experience and the best chance of ranking well on the largest number of phones.

The reason I like this strategy so much is because it provides a lot of fall-back options, if something goes wrong. There are so many different mobile handsets and mobile browsers that it is hard to know that your web content will perform flawlessly. If browser-detection and redirection fails, you still have the self selection option. If that fails or is missed, you still have the handheld style sheet on the traditional content to improve its rendering on the mobile phone. This strategy works because it gives the mobile search engines lots of clues that your content is appropriate for ranking in mobile search. It also allows you to leverage the existing SEO power of your primary domain and still provide separate mobile experience when necessary.

Risks associated with mobile SEO

As you might have guessed, creating a copy of your website and putting it on a subdomain risks duplicate content issues. You would think that the mobile search engines would be smart enough to understand and interpret the duplication, but they can still get confused. If this is the case, your newer mobile content has little hope of ever outranking your older traditional content, even in mobile search. While the browser-detection and redirection should take care of this issue, you the duplicate content also risks bleeding a bit of the SEO value from the content on the traditional site.

If this is a concern, the best thing to do is try using the canonical tag, to push all the value from your mobile site back to your traditional site, and then rely on your browser detection and redirection to take care of the rest. The risk here is that you will hurt your rankings for searches on the less sophisticated phones, because you are pushing all the SEO value to the non-mobile content. The next option, if that doesn’t work, is use your robots.txt file to block the traditional crawler from reaching your mobile content, and potentially also blocking the mobile crawler from accessing your traditional content. This can be a bit risky, and should approached with caution, but should also improve the efficiency of both crawlers, keeping them focused on the content that is most important to them.

The other risk associated with any sophisticated mobile SEO strategy is that you get in trouble for the browser detection and redirection. Search engines are wary of automatic redirection because of its historical use as a spamming technique. The good news is that the search engines are very much in favor of good usability. Since the redirection is for the benefit of the user you should be OK, as long as you are providing the search engines with the same content as the visitors and you are not trying to do anything sneaky. This however, is another good reason to link directly from page-to-page, when you are creating the self selection links, because that is the best way to ensure that the two pages in the redirect scheme have similar content, so the redirect is less likely to be perceived as deceptive.

The future of mobile SEO

As you might have noticed, the mobile space and the development of mobile technology is moving along quite rapidly. It is important to understand that the search engines are scurrying to keep up, and they are still doing a lot of testing. Mobile algorithms get updates just like traditional web search algos, and in some cases, they can be significant.

Changes like the increased personalization of search results and the inclusion of real-time content like tweets and wall-posts is great for mobile search because it provides the user with information that they want quickly and easily. When you think about it, computers can be shared, but mobile phones rarely are, so the level of personalization in mobile search will continue to expand. The search engine can almost always safely assume that the person searching on your phone is you, and they can adapt results based on your previous search behavior, even when you are not actually logged in.

Mobile SEO can also be very focused on location, and though the search engines re not yet actively including your current GPS location in normal mobile web search, I think they will soon. Currently, to include GPS location data with your search query you actually have to set your location before you do your search. The potential for automatic inclusion of location information coupled with the personalization will make mobile search results even harder to anticipate and track. Mobile SEO will focus heavily on traffic as a measure of success for exactly this reason. The caveat is that if you are using mobile SEO to drive foot traffic to a store, people may get everything they need from the map, address, phone number and other information included in a mobile search result, and they may not even need to click through.

Applications are also altering mobile SEO. Mobile searchers are actually turning to mobile search applications instead of web search more and more. These include search engines like WikiTude, UrbanSpoon, RedLaser and Shazam. Downloadable search applications have different input mechanisms that can make them more fun, more interactive or more useful, and in many cases, the results tend to be more specialized and provide more information than a regular mobile web search.

It is also important to understand that applications are actually ranking in Google search results somewhat like a Universal result; so if your app is ranking well in the app store it could be pulled into a normal search result. With the launch of Google’s new mobile application marketplace Campfire, as well as the Android Marketplace and the AppStore, you can expect this to happen even more, both in mobile and traditional results. When you click on the link in the search results, it actually opens the AppStore on your phone or iTunes on your traditional computer, executing a command much like opening a PDF file in Adobe reader. Having applications that rank well in the application marketplaces is important for driving downloads, but it is can also be a strategy to push competitors down in traditional search results, like videos or images that rank in Universal results might do.