This month, a lot of mobile commerce sites are being put to the test for the first time. Mcommerce sites are expected to cross the 10% mark in their contribution to online retail sales, and retailers will be collecting usage data to figure out what users like and dislike. 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 a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Search | Search Marketing: Mobile | Search Marketing: Shopping Search Marketing | SEO: Mobile Search

It's a well known fact that links play a key role in search engine optimization. In addition to providing a physical connection between pages, search engines also use links to get advance notice of the content they'll find at the other end of that link. 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 im [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Search | SEO: Mobile Search

My last few columns painted a picture of QR codes as a force that will disrupt paid search and organic search marketing strategies. QR codes give consumers a faster, easier shortcut than searching in many situations. I talked about how the generation of these "mobile links" will demand brevity from your SEO’d URLs - but how much? As with any new field, there is still a lot of mystery about how to engineer QR codes. Today, I’ll explore this point further by looking at the science of QR code creation, how URL size impacts QR size, and how to start engineering a QR-friendly URL strategy. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | How To | How To: Mobile Marketing | Intermediate | Mobile Search

Living in the old Italian neighborhood in Boston, I come across tourists everyday. It's interesting to observe their behavior, particularly in a setting like Boston, which is famous for being a walking city. 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. [caption id="attachment_80681" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Search activity for Boston landmarks is similar, but the quantities are [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | How To: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Search

"I know why you’re here Neo… It will find you if you want it to." -Trinity Last time I made the case that you’re not mobile-friendly unless you’re friendly to searchers too. I argued that since the marginal cost of achieving basic SEO is lowered by addressing alongside development of mobile friendly content, consumer brands can benefit by making such optimization a launch requirement, thereby accelerating mobile ROI. I also shared an illustration of what I refer to as the "mobile media matrix." Today, I want to apply that framework to put things in bigger perspective, because I u [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | How To: Mobile Marketing | Intermediate | Mobile Search

Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google's webmaster guidelines and best practices. I've pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format: Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones. Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | How To: Mobile Marketing | How To: SEO | SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages | SEO: Duplicate Content | SEO: Mobile Search | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | Top News

Happy new year everyone, and welcome to the year of mobile! I’ll pause to let my mobile colleagues stop laughing, as the year of mobile has been an industry joke since at least 2005, if not before. Did you know O’Reilly declared 2005 to be "the year of local mobile search" in March of 2005? Here we are almost six years later, and while mobile search is still growing at a rate faster than PC search (four times last year’s figure in 2010 according to Google, and 5x in the past two years), accounting for 10% of Google search volume or more, it seems no one really knows what to do differe [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | How To: Mobile Marketing | How To: SEO | SEO: Mobile Search

You actually don't have to be a mobile expert to do mobile marketing. Believe it or not, you actually don't even need mobile-specific technology to do mobile marketing. You just need to be creative and use existing mobile platforms—especially social networks—to distribute your mobile marketing message. 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 yo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | How To: Mobile Marketing | Search Marketing: Mobile | Social Media Marketing

Mobile marketing is now considered the 7th mass media channel after print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV, and the internet. So with this new mass media channel, the question is what's the best way to approach marketing to users of mobile devices? A brief history of mobile marketing Marketing to mobile devices is widely believed to have started in the year 2000 with text message/SMS news services that were free but sponsored by advertising. This evolved into mass promotion of events and alerts with even recent claims of "more than 100% response rate" by Marc Hyatt of Txtlocal, thanks to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | How To: Mobile Marketing | Search Marketing: Mobile

We all know that one of the keys to great SEO is making sure you keep your website updated, new and fresh. Whether you do this with a blog, or you change your homepage with new offers, coupons or new products, it serves to show Google that your site is "alive." For many small businesses in particular, this is a real challenge. So you already have great, fresh content on your site—what’s next? Do you know what is coming that may benefit your small business? Have you heard of QR codes yet? Here is a quick introduction: What Are QR codes? They look like this: They come to us fr [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Mobile | How To | How To: Mobile Marketing | Small Is Beautiful