I once sat in front of a dark, Netflix-enabled flat-screen, watching Netflix on my iPhone. It was just easier, and I had it on, and I could switch back and forth with Facebook, and… ok, maybe I have a problem!

In any event, our personal fascination with mobile phones shouldn’t dictate our work decisions. And one question that needs deciding more and more these days is around mobile search: is there a mobile audience for this particular client? And how do we measure the success of our efforts to get a mobile website in front of mobile searchers?

Of course, our past experience with desktop search gives us a great starting point. Search volumes, traffic, and even rankings are useful metrics, both here and there. But mobile SEO brings some special considerations, not least of which is credibility: we need to prove that mobile SEO provides value.

To that end, I’ve been working on a set of metrics to help me get some perspectives on these questions. These aren’t replacements for visitor counts or conversions – rather, think of them as supplements to help us compare the new and somewhat unfamiliar mobile SEO data to our tried-and-true desktop data.

Today we’ll look at one of the most useful, particularly in the early stages of a campaign.

The Mobile Ratio

One of the challenges in getting started with mobile search is proving the value of your efforts: is anyone using a phone to search for this client’s products or services?

To answer that with a simple, understandable metric, I’ve added a Mobile Ratio to the keyword research process. Basically, I’ll start by taking a desktop keyword list, and running the numbers to add mobile figures alongside. I’ll also expand the list if I find any mobile-specific keywords that seem interesting.

Then I’ll take the desktop and mobile volumes, and divide one into the other to compute the Mobile Ratio. For example, if I have a Mobile Ratio of 10, then I can tell the client that for every ten desktop searchers, we have the opportunity to reach one mobile searcher.

Straightforward statements like that allow a client to get their bearings, and start to form a mental model of what mobile means to them. Maybe they’d really like to add another one-tenth to their reach. Or maybe they have easier ways of getting access to those extra eyeballs. Either way, they now have some useful infomation on which to base a decision.

Getting Granular

Doing this at both the keyword and aggregate level allows you to compare and contrast mobile activity for different keywords. So if my aggregate Mobile Ratio is 10, but I have a group of keywords that have ratios in the 5-6 range, then I know these keywords are mobile-heavy: they are more likely to be of interest to mobile users.

This is key info for site-planning and budgeting activities, as it can provide a business justfication for heavying-up on landing pages that address those keywords. Likely examples of keywords that are mobile-heavy could include coupon keywords, or keywords that include a location name.

The Mobile Ratio lets you identify keywords that are mobile-heavy. Here, "pocket knife" searches are strong, while branded searches ("Victorinox") are relatively light. Good inputs for planning a mobile content strategy. (Not one of my clients, by the way.)

Driving Strategy

In the end, the Mobile Ratio doesn’t create another data point. Instead, it offers a more intuitive way of looking at the data you already have, turning it into a KPI that you can use to make decisions about your mobile marketing plans.

In upcoming articles, we’ll take a look at some other useful metrics for managing mobile SEO.

Dim Sum Versus Steak

Let’s start with user needs. Jacon Nielson recently published a study confirming that bite-size chunks of content are best for mobile users. “When in doubt, leave it out” was his sound-bite takeaway. Given our own personal experience with small screens and choppy bandwidth, his conclusion seems pretty intuitive.

But bite-size content clashes with our ability to optimize and promote these pages to search engines. We need more copy, not less, to be able to insert keywords and get traction for a variety of terms.

As we saw last month, Amazon splits product information into two mobile pages.

Amazon’s mcommerce site tries to solve this problem by providing a very short on-page description, and then linking to a second page for more details. This satifies usability, but isn’t ideal at all for search. That second page has all the content, but the first page is likely to have better link authority.

Fortunately, there’s a solution that was developed to solve other sorts of design problems, that can also be helpful for mobile SEO.

Introducing JQM

JQuery Mobile (JQM) is a JavaScript library that was built to close the gap between mobile sites and native apps. Apps typically have the advantage when it comes to interactivity, taking advantage of a library of user interface elements, and offering seamless screen-to-screen transitions.

JQM was built to take advantage of the latest HTML5 and CSS tricks, to help Web designers close the gap with their app developer counterparts.

I published a review of JQM on Search Engine Land back in April, when it was still in alpha and under heavy development. Version 1.0 finally launched last month, and fulfills on the promise of providing app-like capabilities that work on any smartphone – build once, use anywhere.

Leveraging JQM For SEO

One particular aspect of JQM will be useful in solving our content issue. The platform provides a number of options for loading new webpages into a phone, giving designers the ability to import content without keeping a user waiting for a download.

The option of interest to us is called “Internal Linked Pages.” JQM allows multiple pages to be packaged as one big file, where the “links” between pages simply drag the new content into view.

To the user, a new “page” has been loaded – but in reality, that page was already downloaded to the phone, waiting to be viewed. The plus for SEO is that search engine spiders will also download this batch of small pages as a single large file – one that appears to have a decent amount of indexable content.

See the video, starting at 3:05,  for a demonstration of how JQM behaves on a phone:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Combine these capabilities with a strategy for developing mobile commerce content, and the result will be a store that’s not only easy to use, but easy to find on Google as well.

In my own shopping experiences, both through mobile sites and mobile apps, I’m finding a consistent theme running through the product pages I see: retailers are unsure how to handle product descriptions.

It’s a fact of life that mobile screens are small, and I’ve recently looked at how that impacts decisions about SEO and mobile content.

“Hide-and-seek” Content

Retailers are trying different approaches with respect to the design of their description areas. Some hide them completely, providing a “more info”-type link to keep the clutter to a minimum. Others provide a small sample of the description, while a few brave souls actually include the entire text – sometimes several screens worth.

Amazon's mcommerce site provides a very short on-page description, linking to a second page for more details.

While these approaches deal with user interface issues, they’re all trying to fix a fundamental problem: mobile sites are using product descriptions created for desktop sites. And quite often, these descriptions are already second-hand, pulled from offline catalogs, manufacturer databases, or print brochures that promote the product. Sometimes they’re long, sometimes short, but they’re often not optimized for search, or edited to fit the needs of mobile users.

Specific Pitfalls With Mobile SEO

Here are some red flags to look for when evaluating product descriptions for an mcommerce site:

• Descriptions from the manufacturer. You’ll find these copied at all your competitor websites. Google dismisses duplicated content from natural search listings, so you’ll be completely reliant on shopping results as your non-paid channel.
• Marketing lingo. Often a symptom of manufacturer-supplied content. Filled with brand attributes but no descriptive keywords.
• Lists of specs. A common pitfall for B2B, or any technology product.

How To Manage Wholesale Revisions

Once you’ve identified problem areas, you can start to plan what resources you’ll need to make changes. There are lots of ways to manage the workflow for a wholesale upgrade of your product copy:

• In-house staff. Either full-timers or interns. This is the direct approach, and produces consistent results, but it can get expensive.
• User-generated edits. Think Wikipedia, where readers suggest edits to make the description better. This is clever and cheap, but you need a very large audience to get enough activity. Plus, moderation is necessary to keep the quality up.
• Crowdsourcing. My personal favorite. Revising large numbers of products is an ideal project for a team of remote workers, who can log-in on their own time and tackle them a few at a time. Crowdsourcing tools are difficult to master, but once you nail down a process, you can plow through thousands of SKUs in a few weeks, with good quality results and no need for extra staff.

Pick Your Battles

Whatever method you choose, costs are an important consideration. Creating content – even in bite-size chunks – can get expensive. And that cost has to be justified by ROI.

So how do we prioritize a project where there might be thousands of SKUs to look at?

Clockwise from top left: Buy.com is very text-heavy, while Best Buy only has specs. Walmart.com has a good balance of copy and specs.

Let’s start with the highest priority fixes, and work our way down:

• Top sellers. You could sort this by sheer volume of sales, or their contribution to profits – whatever defines business success for your store.
• Word count. The longest descriptions probably good candidates for a “long-story-short” version.
• Lack of category name in the text. This is a good indication that the description lacks keywords. Most mcommerce sites are run from a database, so a script that looks for category names in the text can be quick way to assess this.
• Ratio of numbers to letters. For technical products (especially B2B) a lot of numbers in the description (say, 20%) mean you’re probably looking at a spec sheet.

So now you’ve identified the your mobile commerce site’s issues, chosen a method for manage the workflow, and singled-out the products that need revising. Now you can circle back to the “hide-and-seek” design issue, and adapt your page designs to fit the content.

I’ll get into that in the next column, but if you’d like a sneak preview of the factors we’ll be talking about, have a look at my past article on using JQuery Mobile for SEO.

Siri, the voice recognition app that comes standard with the new iPhone, can be used to control text messaging and reminders inside the device. But it can also be used as a search tool, to call up specific information from the outside world.

With the mobile search space already in flux, Siri adds a game-changing angle, particularly for marketers that want to reach the lucrative (presumably affluent) iPhone audience.

Here are some factors for businesses to consider as Siri grows in both audience and usage:

• Siri works. Siri’s voice recognition is nearly flawless, and its utility right now is only limited by the APIs that Apple has given it to work with. It’s likely that the API list will grow, giving iPhone users access to pretty much any form of information they can verbally request.
• Siri is a velvet rope. Apple’s choice of APIs to power Siri will, in effect, choose the leading search tools for the iPhone. As Danny Sullivan and Greg Sterling reported, an iPhone user can ask Siri to use Bing or Yahoo to perform a search. But Google is the default, and most users will take the default option if it serves them well.
• Pick your battle. For any given business, there will be one all-important API that needs to know who you are. Today, that’s pretty much limited to Google Search, Google Places and Yelp. But in the future, Apple may add APIs to cover more niches. For example, if one of the many physician portals is chosen as the API for look-ups, then it will be very important for doctors to get listed there.
• Make that two APIs. Google is also advancing the voice recognition functions on Android, and may match Siri for ease of use. If so, you can expect their “Siri” (“Andrew”?) to become the lead search method on many other smartphones. In which case, all the planning implied above gets doubled, with two tracks of promotional tactics to hit both platforms.
• Siri likes keywords. When searching for restaurants that serve ravioli, Siri returns a list of places that mention ravioli in their Yelp reviews. Yes folks, keyword optimization is still very much the name of the game.
• Siri localizes by default. “Show me restaurants” uses the Location Services in my iPhone to correctly assume that I want a list of Boston restaurants.
• Punjabi “Dubba”. One of my favorite Indian places is Punjabi Dhaba, a fast-paced joint that serves fresh, hot Indian on mess-hall steel trays. But Siri can’t understand the name. Fortunately, they happen to be No. 1 when you ask for a list of Indian places in Cambridge. In this case, attention to both keywords and category choices can help make up for a name that voice recognition systems find challenging.

Siri can find restaurants by type, and even by keyword, but sometimes has difficulty recognizing names.

As Apple continues to develop Siri, we’ll see what directions it (she?) takes, and I’ll post updates here to track how it impacts mobile search marketing.

While it’s true that search engines place the greatest value on links that come from other websites, they also take notice of the links connecting pages on your own site.

Therefore, SEO consultants will spend a lot of time focusing on the site’s navigation menu, adding keywords to make the menu more self-explanatory. But why is this so important?

Both desktop and mobile websites have to balance the need for keyword-rich links with the need to provide a clean, intuitive layout.

“About” Who? “About” What?

On a typical website, navigation menus are often loaded with links, and sometimes forced to rely on context to keep the links short.

For example, the “Services” link tells you… not very much at all. But it’s assumed that you can see that you’re on a landscaper’s website, so “Services” will mean something to you.

While this works from a usability standpoint, it can fall short when it comes to search engines.

The engines are always looking for reassurance that they’re on the right track. “Services” doesn’t say much. But when search engines see a “Landscaping Services” link, and land on a page that matches, they get the reassurance they need, and rank the page accordingly.

A Quick Experiment

Sticky notes are a good test environment for thinking about navigation links. When we jot down a to-do list, we favor brevity to conserve space, relying on the fact that we just need a hint to remind us about what needs to be done.

Yesterday, I wrote “mobile nav” on one, knowing that it would remind me to finish this article.

There was no chance that I’d mistake it for a reminder to buy myself a GPS device. But if someone else saw the note, they might very well have thought that.

That’s the position a search engine finds itself in: trying to make sense of other people’s notes, and looking for that extra bit of information to make things clear.

Designing Mobile Website Menus

So context isn’t enough – we need descriptive links that tell search engines the whole story. But it’s not easy to accomplish when designing a webpage, and it’s even harder when your screen shrinks down to the size of a sticky note.

Mobile designers have no choice but to use short links, small buttons, and lots of context – otherwise, there would be nothing left for the actual content. And yet, with search dominating mobile just as it does on the desktop, we need to get SEO done right.

Alternatives To Overstuffed Menus

One solution is to make better use of copy links. It’s already considered an SEO best practice to try to embed bits of blue text into your content, whenever you happen to reference a fact or feature that can be found on another page.

For example, if the landscaper’s site mentions “sprinkler maintenance” on a lawn care page, that phrase should link to the sprinkler maintenance page. Good for the user, and great for search engines.

On mobile sites, this technique gets promoted from nice-to-have to an absolute must-have. Even on mobile sites that have minimal content, there’s usually more text to be found here than in the navigation menu. Copy links become your best avenue for getting detailed link text on your mobile webpages.

Other techniques you can try: providing a sitemap page with full-size links, or a more extensive footer menu that provides longer links without interrupting the user experience. Either way, you’re giving the search engine just a bit more information to get its job done.

This timing element could be applied to a lot of other industries; let’s look at online retail.

Product Searches

As search marketers, we understand the difference between someone typing in a generic product search, versus a brand or brand/product search. The generic searcher is earlier in the buying cycle, and approaching their research without a favorite brand in mind (at least, not one they’re openly expressing.)

In contrast, a desktop search for a product name indicates a person with an established preference. That person may be ready to buy, or checking price, availability, etc.

When that search originates from a mobile phone, it can indicate even more immediacy. It’s still a research activity, but it even more likely to be a price check. In fact, this person could be standing in front of the product right now, at a brick-and-mortar retail store.

A good price will seal the deal for the online retailer. But there’s a caveat: it’s very likely that the shopper will wait until they get home to make the purchase: on their PC. Repeat customers may have log-ins that work across all their devices, letting you tie the story together and credit your mobile campaign with the sale. But for non-loyal customers, this type of cross-channel attribution can be tough to figure out.

Mobile-specific coupon codes are a low-tech way to solve for this. A percentage of your customers will keep them, and use them when they hit the desktop site. (Be sure to inform your desktop IT team, so they can allow the mobile codes to generate discounts!)

Product Reviews

Reviews for a specific product are a common class of search terms, even in mobile search. Reading a review is a standard research action, but actively searching for reviews from a phone can indicate a customer who received a suggestion and is looking for a second opinion.

It could also be a customer who really wants this product, and is looking for more info to basically talk themselves into it (Or maybe that’s just what I do.)

Either way, you have a reader that already has this product on their shortlist. Landing page tests can determine what will get these shoppers to finally open their wallet.

Another coupon code might work here, but so could free shipping, or trustmarks like a magazine’s 5-star rating – anything that lowers the mental barrier to purchasing. The choice of tactics is important, because mobile screens won’t allow for a cluttered array of information.

Mobile search activity for one consumer electronics brand. Reviews are highly sought after, both in the US and global markets.

Part Numbers

This is more for the B2B arena, though it also applies to consumer electronics. A part number search from a mobile phone is a strong indication of someone needing a direct replacement for something they already have, be it a burned-out component or a duplicate of a product they’ve already tested.

This isn’t a time to emphasize value or trustmarks – what this person wants to know most is availability. “In Stock Now”, right next to the buy button, will motivate them to act.

Timing & Customer Intent

As mobile becomes more popular, it gives search marketers a great option for contacting potential customers at multiple points in the buying cycle. I’ll continue to look at different industries in future articles , if you have any requests, leave them in the comments.

Most tourists already have a hotel booked by the time they arrive. They have a set timeframe, and a short list of sights to see. Beyond that, a lot of their time is up for grabs. And they’re all carrying mobile phones of one type or another.

Search activity for Boston landmarks is similar, but the quantities are different. More importantly, the timing is different, and will strongly influence how you build your landing pages.

Where’s The Mobile Marketing Opportunity?

Here are a few travel-related businesses that could tap into demand from the tourist on the ground:

• Landmarks. If you’re an organization promoting a landmark, or a business nearby wanting to capitalize on your neighbor’s visitors, landmark content is a great magnet for mobile SEO traffic.
• Restaurants. For restaurants, location is everything. If someone searches “seafood near Freedom Trail” and you don’t mention “Freedom Trail” on your site (or in your PPC keywords), you’ll miss that opportunity. Think like a tourist when planning your mobile SEO and PPC; use the terms they are likely to care about.
• Bicycle Rentals. Tourists sometimes get ideas from the destination itself, and seeing a cyclist ride past can trigger a search. Same goes for group tours, boat rides, and other sightseeing activities. Setting up mobile PPC ads for keyphrases like “bicycle rental boston” costs very little, and can be left on autopilot. The mobile landing page would focus on location, hours, and would provide a clickable phone number. (If you have an online reservation system on your desktop website, I’d skip it – better to get them on the phone or into the shop at that point.)

The Crossover Point Between Desktop & Mobile Search

As mentioned earlier, tourists book their hotel reservations before they arrive. So any hotel’s effort to get a tourist’s attention once they’re in Boston would naturally have little effect.

Other travel businesses have buying cycles that are less clear-cut, and we see crossover points where desktop search passes the baton to mobile search.

Let’s look at this more closely:

• Hotels. If I’m the typical Boston tourist, I was probably sitting at my PC 2-3 months ago, typing “hotels in Boston” into Google. Getting a PPC ad in front of me would require some geotargeting (I was sitting in Buffalo, typing a “Boston” search), timing (it’s 2-3 months before the warm weather starts), and good ad copy (mentioning a nearby landmark e.g. “Steps from the Freedom Trail”), The desktop searcher wants a landing page with photos and an online booking system. In contrast, the mobile searcher (already on the ground) wants an address, directions from the airport, and the check-in time.
• Bicycle Rentals. People are just as likely to plan a bike rental in advance as they are to look for one at the destination. Here, a desktop strategy would echo the hotel approach, directing searchers to a desktop landing page with guide maps, photos of bikes, and quick access to online reservations.
• Tickets. If you’re planning to take in a Sox game while you’re in Boston, there are lots of ticket vendors competing for your business. A desktop search for “red sox tickets” should bring you to a landing page with every available game, letting you choose what fits your schedule. In contrast, a mobile search is probably more time-sensitive: that first landing page should show you tonight’s game, a Buy button, and a link to the game list as a secondary page.

So if there is a formula for playing desktop and mobile search, it comes down to timing, landing page design, and the ability to anticipate what a customer needs at each point in the buying cycle. Similar logic can be applied to any industry, and can help you find creative ways to use mobile search as part of your overall marketing mix.

Let’s take a look at three of the major players.

WordPress Mobile Versions

There are two versions of the WordPress platform: the hosted WordPress.com service, and the self-installed WordPress.org package that you can run on your own server. Let’s start with the hosted version.

When visiting a WordPress.com blog, the system looks at the visitor’s user agent setting, which identifies what web browser they are using. If it recognizes the browser as being phone-related, it will substitute the usual webpage with an abbreviated version designed for mobile, at the very same URL – no redirects to another page like m.anything.com.

The mobile version isn’t just streamlined from a visual standpoint – the underlying code and content are also slimmed down. Post excerpts are kept short (about 160 characters) and sidebar content (e.g. “Popular Posts”) is removed.

Overall it’s a very functional adaptation, and one that owners of WordPress.org packages can also enjoy, because it’s based on the freely available WP-Touch plug-in. Once set-up, this plug-in will produce the same behavior on your own server.

From an SEO standpoint, the lack of redirection keeps things clean as far as indexing is concerned. From a content standpoint, the home page obviously suffers due to the abbreviated excerpts. But that’s not a huge loss from an SEO standpoint; the typical blog lacks keyword focus on the home page anyway – lots of posts, lots of topics. A blog’s SEO fame will usually be tied to its inbound linking or individual posts, not to home page content, and those will be uneffected.

It’s also important to note that individual blog posts are not shortened, they are presented full-length on a single page, just like on the desktop. In fact, the mobile version’s lack of sidebar content may actually help SEO for these pages, by giving them an exclusive focus on the topic at hand.

Blogger On Mobile Devices

Blogger also makes use of user agent detection to make decisions about what type of template to show, but the action it takes is slightly different. When receiving a page request from a phone, Blogger will redirect you from the main URL (e.g. myblog.blogspot.com) to a mobile variation (e.g. myblog.blogspot.com/?m=1)

Being a Google product, one would presume that Blogger’s redirect method won’t cause any problems with Googlebot-Mobile’s efforts to index the mobile site, or with the link equity you have on your home page. But Blogger’s mobile template is still officially in beta, so you’ll want to pay attention to how Google’s mobile search engine reacts to it, and post feedback to Blogger’s staff if you see anything suspicious.

As far as content is concerned, the trade-offs are identical to WordPress: a clipped home page, backed by full-length blog posts.

Posterous & Mobile Templates

Posterous is the newest of the platforms covered here, but they have a reputation for innovation so it’s no surprise that they’ve already introduced mobile templates, both for their Blog and Groups products.

The scenario is very much what we’ve described for Blogger and WordPress, however Posterous takes a more minimalist approach.

Home pages are reduced to a simple list of blog post titles, with no excerpts given. The complete lack of non-link content may take your home page out of the SEO game altogether – it’ll get indexed, but there’s literally nothing to read here. Your SEO efforts on a Posterous blog will center entirely on getting individual posts to rank well.

Best Practices For Mobile SEO

The good news is that all these platforms are taking a similar route, so best practices are easy to formulate. Here are a few factors to keep in mind as you manage your blog:

• Post titles are more important than ever, because they become a large portion of the visible content on your blog’s home page. Engines and users alike will be very dependent on your post titles to figure out what your content is about.
• Posts themselves are largely untouched, so there’s no technical need to write shorter posts. One might argue that mobile users will have a get-to-the-point attitude when it comes to mobile content. But my opinion is that commercial sites need to be brief (“Where’s that 1-800 number?”) whereas blogs are for readers, and readers, well, want to read. For more on this, check out my previous post on brevity versus mobile SEO.
• A suggestion specific to self-hosted WordPress bloggers (or anyone self-hosting a platform) would be to constantly maintain updates for your mobile plug-ins. Because these plug-ins rely on user agent lists, these lists have to stay updated to keep-up with new phones being released to the market. At minimum, you’ll want to update whenever you see a new wave of TV commercials for a hot new phone.

jQuery Mobile is a set of scripts and style sheets made specifically for mobile phones, and has the potential to even the playing field between apps and mobile websites. Best of all, they’ve accomplished this while giving SEO consultants a great set of tools for shaping content.

Here’s a short video to take you through the features:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Mobile Web Can Be Messy

Most smartphones are capable of displaying full-size websites these days, but the experience is far from ideal. Pinch-to-zoom lets you magnify pages at will, but lots of panning and adjusting is necessary to get that article centered on your screen.

Mobile-specific websites are one solution, but users can have bad experiences with them, too. A lot of mobile websites are stripped down to the bare minimum, offering very little in the way of interaction or visuals. They’re not compelling to users, and the temptation on the part of marketers is to escape the Web altogether and build an app.

Time For A Mobile Makeover

Now, jQuery Mobile promises to bring mobile web design a lot closer to the high-water mark set by native apps. It’s a plug-and-play solution that allows you to create touchable buttons, sliders, and page transitions, all using conventional HTML as the foundation.

It’s designed to work with a wide variety of phones, including the Webkit-based browsers found in iPhones, iPads, Androids, and the latest Blackberries. And it doesn’t leave older phones behind – the code is designed to step-down to a standard webpage when the browser isn’t equipped for the job.

jQuery Mobile makes mobile websites much more competitive with apps, upping the design game while preserving the advantages that mobile sites have always enjoyed:  universal access through any phone, and searchable content. In fact, it provides some creative opportunities for packaging SEO-friendly content.

Solving Content Issues From A New Angle

Last month, I talked about the need to balance SEO and usability when developing mobile site content. A bit of thoughtful planning can help you decide when to be brief and when to be verbose. If done at the earliest stages of development, the result will be a site that avoids clutter, while presenting optimized content where it counts.

jQuery Mobile makes the process easier, by giving you a few options for building and linking webpages:

• You can build a webpage consisting of a single HTML file, linked to other HTML files – just like any conventional website.
• You can also have AJAX pull-in the new page, resulting in a smooth app-like transition. This might sound bad for SEO, but it’s underpinned by a conventional HTML link, so the engines can find and index every page.
• Lastly, you can package multiple pages into a single file. Older WAP sites used to be built this way, with “decks” of pages sent in one shot – not unlike a Powerpoint full of slides. This too might sound bad for SEO, but it can actually be a huge plus: bundling a few content-light pages into a single file gives them more weight, resulting in a more competitive page for SEO.

The trick is to use this method judiciously, grouping pages where they make sense.

For example, an automotive site could group pages about one model (overview, specs, photos) into a single file. Or they could create a buyer’s guide for a particular type of vehicle, with individual “pages” that highlight vehicles in that class.

Restaurant reviews are another example. Each review is relatively short, and adds to the overall story. Grouping user-generated reviews into a single file can add plenty of long-tail potential to your SEO efforts. And jQuery Mobile lets you have that performance, while giving users the smooth swipe-over transitions that make the experience much more enjoyable.

But you don’t want to overdo it. If you make your whole website into a single file, you’d only have one URL indexed by the search engines. That would drastically narrow your chances of hitting targeted keywords.

jQuery Mobile is in late-stage alpha right now, with beta coming next month and a full release expected this summer.

Designers favor a “don’t make me think” approach, giving their users visuals and navigation but holding back on copy. SEOs, of course, are always pushing for more content, mindful of the search engines’ appetite for a page that focuses on keywords.

This debate gets interesting when applied to mobile websites. On the desktop, the question of how much copy is too much can feel very subjective: SEOs push, and designers push back. In the mobile space, the designers have a stronger point to make: that 21-inch monitor is gone, replaced by a 4-inch screen with tiny fonts. The need for brevity becomes more significant, and hard to argue against.

So how do we solve for this? How do we reconcile the need for brevity with the need for keyword-rich optimized content?

To resolve this debate, we have to look at how the typical visitor interacts with your particular website.

Come Here Often?

Let’s take ESPN.com, a desktop site that is a daily experience for a large percentage of its users. They know the URL, type it from memory, and come back frequently. Same for the mobile site.

Contrast that with a local sporting goods store. Customers visit their website maybe once or twice: first, when they research who to buy from, and maybe one more time for contact information, or to check a particular product. This isn’t meant to be discouraging – it’s simply a reality check, and helps us prioritize what factors are important to us.

If your site is heavily dependent on repeat traffic, then usability has to be a very high priority. People need to find their way through your site, and the experience has to be pleasant… or more to the point, not irritating. Fast-loading pages, with concise navigation and minimal scrolling, will be appreciated by your audience.

For the sporting goods store, the needs are very different. Here, the focus is on being found in the first place. A site needs to be competitive to be found in mobile search engines. With search being as common on mobile phones as it is on the desktop, the need for keyword-rich content can’t be overlooked. So in this scenario, brevity might need to take a backseat to optimization.

The best way to determine which scenario applies to you is to look at the metrics for your desktop site – specifically, new visitors versus returning visitors, and see which behavior is dominent.

Refining The Model

There’s a second factor to consider, one that we think about when planning desktop sites, but easily gets lost when planning mobile sites. When designing a desktop site, we look at each page as a freestanding document, and consider how that page will be used.

Home pages need branding and lots of navigation, whereas internal pages need more product-centric content. It’s second nature to most SEOs and designers to make these distinctions, and pages are designed accordingly.

But things start to get vague when it comes to mobile sites. There’s the assumption that design decisions have to be uniformly applied to the entire website: if brevity is the goal, every page must be brief! And it doesn’t have to be that way: we have as much flexibility in mobile site design as we do with desktop sites.

Top-Light, Bottom-Heavy

So if we circle back to the ESPN example, we can see that the home page will probably need to focus on usability, because people need to get to game scores and stories as quickly as possible. But once they get down to those lower-level pages, they’re looking for reading material, and brevity isn’t really desired.

These also happen to be the pages where we need SEO: the articles that focus on commonly searched teams and players. So these pages should be full-length, and optimized to draw sports fans from the search engines.

For the sporting goods store, we have different needs but similar conclusions. If people search for a business by name, they need to arrive at a concise home page with contact info displayed front and center, plus a few links to the company’s offerings.

But if they search by topic – say, a type of baseball glove – then SEO needs to roll-up its sleeves and get those pages ranked, using plenty of optimized copy and anything else in the toolbox.

Figure 1: A mobile home page should have the essentials necessary for your typical user. Internal pages can stretch a bit longer, providing content that is comparable to a desktop site.

Wrapping Up

The key is to recognize that broadly-applied standards are not helpful or even necessary. Mobile webpages should be looked at individually, assigned a purpose that aligns with user needs, and designed accordingly. And yes, that does imply that a mobile site should be planned separately from a desktop site, and that puts us at odds with the more economical one site for everyone approach.

But in the end, it’ll be worth the added effort. The result will be a mobile site that feels right to the user, but was also easy to find five minutes ago, when the user was typing a search into their touch screen.