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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, I would argue just the opposite.

iPhone birthed the mobile web

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

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

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

Mobile SEO is not desktop SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article is part of Local Search Week here at Search Engine Land, a special look at local search marketing issues in the run-up to our SMX Local & Mobile conference next month.

To be an effective mobile SEO you must first understand in general how mobile search results pages differ from traditional search results pages. Then it is important to understand the specifics of how mobile search engine results pages differ amongst themselves.

Mobile search results vs. Traditional search results

Results page layout: Mobile search results, including those for the iPhone, render in one long column as opposed to the multiple column layout that is presented in traditional search results. This makes sponsored results harder to spot, even when they are labeled, because they appear inline with the organic results. In an attempt to improve the usability and appeal of their product, many mobile search engines and search results pages are designed more like portals, with links to specific information and customization options to decrease the amount of typing necessary for the user to find what he or she is looking for.

Local & vertical results: The major mobile search engines are competing to create the best user experience possible. In many instances doing so involves the search engines surmising the user’s search goal and presenting the user with those specific search results first. For that reason, mobile search engines put a higher focus on local and vertical results, frequently featuring them much more prominently than traditional web results. These can include: maps, local results, links to official sites, images, weather and even sports scores. These results are even more important to consider in the mobile web, because of their premium placement on limited mobile results pages.

Character limits: As you might expect, mobile search results are frequently truncated versions of what would normally appear in the traditional results page. If you are optimizing a mobile-specific site, there are a whole new set of character limits to work with when optimizing meta data. If you are optimizing an existing site to be found in both mobile and traditional search, you should abide by the character limits for tradition search while at the same time remaining conscious of what will be omitted in the mobile search results.

URL display: In traditional search results, complete URLs are always provided for each search result, but this is not always the case in mobile search engines. Some mobile search engines will eliminate the ‘http://’ from the URL, or display only the domain in the search results, even though the result links to a deeper page on the site. Optimized sub-domains can be very useful in traditional SEO, but might be even more useful in mobile search engines, when everything after the domain extension (.com/.net/.co.uk etc.) is eliminated. Since savvy users sometimes evaluate display URLs to determine which result they will click on, the architecture of the URL can be used to influence that decision.

To make this more concrete, consider a person looking for the results of a football game on a mobile phone. Which URL seems like it is the most likely to get you the information in the fewest number of clicks:

• a. ESPN.com
• b. NFL.ESPN.com
• c. Football-Scores.ESPN.com
• d. FootballScores.com

I believe that the correct answer is likely a tie between options ‘c’ and ‘d.’ While ESPN is clearly an authority site, FootballScores.com and ESPN.com may lure some viewers away because of their simplicity. Optimized sub-domains are a good idea in some cases, but even in mobile SEO they are not always the best option. In some instances, users are more likely to click on simpler URLs, and other times they are not.

Mobile search engines are not all alike

Number of results on results page: One of the more frustrating differences between the mobile search engines is the number of results they present on the main results page, and the number of results that they will present on the secondary ‘web results’ page. Because mobile search engines are designed more like portals than traditional search engines, they have all come up with a variety of ways to present the information that is yielded from a search result. This can be handy for users but makes tracking and comparison a bit trickier.

In general, the major mobile search engines will provide a variable number of vertical results, based on relevance and a set number of mobile web results on the main results page. Windows Live provides two mobile web results on the main results landing page, Google Mobile and AOL Mobile provide six, Google iPhone provides eight and Yahoo provides 10. The exception is Google iPhone, which does not present verticals on the main results page at all, but instead presents eight web results and provides tabs along the top if the user needs to access local or vertical results.

Search box location: The AOL mobile landing page provides a search box at the top and bottom of the page, but only on the bottom of the results page. Conversely, Yahoo OneSearch provides a search box at the top of the landing page, and a search box at the bottom and the top of the results page. Windows Live provides one search box at the top of the search landing page, and one at the bottom of the results page. Google iPhone provides only one search box at the top of the landing page and the top of the results page.

Local & vertical results: Some mobile search engines, like AOL and Google iPhone will break local and vertical results into different tabs along the top of the page. Others will present a mixed landing page with vertical results such as maps, weather forecasts, images and sports scores provided inline with web results. Google Mobile and Yahoo OneSearch both maintain results pages where the main focus is web results, but they do integrate some vertical results inline with web results. Conversely, AOL Mobile and Windows Live both provide mixed results that do not focus on any particular type of result.

Location setting: It won’t be long before GPS enabled mobile devices set and update a user’s location automatically, but for now setting your location is still a manual process. While Google Mobile, AOL Mobile and Windows Live all allow you to set your location, Google iPhone and Yahoo OneSearch do not. Google and AOL Mobile both have options on the main search page to change your location. Google Mobile will allow you to set your location by city or zip code, but AOL takes it a step further and lets you specify your location down to the street address.

Windows Live does not have links on the main search page to change your default location; instead, they update the user’s default location whenever the user searches for a specific geographic location, so if your default location is set to Denver, but you want information about a restaurant in Houston you can search for ‘PapaMia Houston’ and your default location will be updated to Houston for subsequent searches. Unfortunately, there are no options or instructions for changing the default location on the main search page, so users are left to figure this out on their own.

Location settings can impact the local and vertical results that you are presented, and in the future may also affect the mobile web rankings as well. Currently, Google, AOL Mobile and Windows Live are tailoring the local and vertical results by the user’s default location, but are not tailoring web results by location.

Keyword bolding: Traditional search engines will sometimes put the keyword(s) that you have searched for in bold to help your eye key into the most relevant results. Most of the mobile search engines, (all but Windows Live) have adopted this practice to varying degrees as well. Yahoo OneSearch will bold keywords in the title line, description and URL, while all of the Google driven engines, including Google Mobile, Google iPhone and AOL Mobile will only bold terms when they are located in the description part of the results. Windows live is the only engine evaluated that is not bolding any keywords in search results pages.

User agent detection: Currently, Google Mobile, AOL Mobile and Microsoft OneSearch incorporate user agent detection to determine exactly what type of mobile device you are using to access their search engine. They will then use that information to optimize the results pages for viewing on your specific mobile device. This is done primarily to ensure images, maps and other graphics to are sized to fit the screen without right-to-left scrolling. In the future, this information could be integrated into the search algorithm to improve the ranking for pages that display well on your specific mobile device.

Transcoding: Google Mobile, AOL Mobile and Windows Live all integrate transcoding software to re-arrange web pages that are designed for the traditional web and to make them viewable on a smaller screen. This is good news for sites that have yet to begin optimizing the user experience for the mobile web, but can also cause problems. Forms or JavaScript may be rendered un-usable on the transcoded version of the site, and the transcoded page may not provide adequate idea arrangement of the elements on the page.

While transcoding improves the usability of the site in the short term, it may hinder SEO and can make interacting with the site more difficult. The transcoded page is hosted temporarily on the search engine server and domain, rather than on the original website. It is unclear weather transcoding impacts Google’s evaluation of the activity on your site, but it definitely makes it harder to get accurate links to the site because the URLs are re-formulated in the transcoding. Many of the mobile search engines have indicated that they recognize the ‘handheld’ style sheet, and will use it to render the site when it is available, but in our testing this was not the case. In all cases, you can choose to view the html version of the site by clicking on a link at the bottom of the page, or simply performing your search in the traditional version of the search engine, rather than the mobile version.

How will this Impact mobile SEO?

All of the differences that we can see amongst the mobile search engine players are simply an indication that the industry is still in its infancy, and has yet to develop standards. Mobile search engines are still determining how they can provide users with the best experience, and SEOs are still figuring out how to compare such variable results. The main conclusions that can be drawn is that mobile SEO is different from traditional SEO, but not so different that everything must be re-learned. mobile SEOs must be patient for the mobile web and the mobile search experience to catch up with the traditional web that we have become so used to. It is an exciting time in mobile SEO, when things are constantly changing, standards are slowly being formed and nothing is taken for granted.

Cindy Krum is the Senior SEO Analyst for Blue Moon Works, Inc., a provider of marketing and strategy services.

This article is part of Local Search Week here at Search Engine Land, a special look at local search marketing issues in the run-up to our SMX Local & Mobile conference next month.

The folks at BNET.com—a comprehensive business resource—knew they needed a mobile site that their constituents—busy, often traveling, C-level executives and managers—could access on the run. What BNET didn’t realize when they created the mobile version of their blogs (see Figure 1)—with a simplified version of each preexisting, “regular” blog post—was that inadvertently they had created duplicate content (see Figure 2).

Figure 1: Blog post on BNET.com and its corresponding mobile version

From an SEO perspective, this can be detrimental because it splits link popularity between multiple versions of the page, can cause search engines to return the wrong page for a given medium (mobile or wireline/traditional computer), and can even cause search engine spiders to stop indexing pages of a site because it finds too many copies of the same pages with differing URLs.

Figure 2: Google results page that illustrate’s BNET’s duplicate content problem

BNET is hoping to go live with a solution soon that uses CSS to leverage user agent detection. This is one of the better practices (if not the best) for mobile website design. Essentially, instead of creating secondary webpages, a secondary CSS file can be added to a website specifically for mobile devices. At this point in time, as opposed to some of the “@” calls or links that are available, it seems that the most consistent way to present the handheld stylesheet is to use the on-page <link> element:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”handheld” href=”mobile.css” />

This style sheet is recognized by mobile device browsers and used instead of the primary CSS file. The mobile CSS file reformats the content for better usability on a mobile device, and can strip out elements in the site that are too large or download-intensive for the average mobile device. The resulting user experience is a fast-loading, simplified version of the same webpage at the same URL. When it’s time to redesign or update the site, it only has to be done once and—presto!—the mobile CSS file continues to render the new design in a mobile-friendly format.

BNET.com’s new mobile CSS solution will reduce issues of duplicate content, and should also save editorial resources. For detailed information on the parameters of creating a CSS-driven mobile version of a site, go to W3.org/TR/css-mobile.

Jeff Muendel is a Search Analyst at Netconcepts, a web agency specializing in search engine optimized e-commerce.

Some websites performed really well on a slow connection, and others were just unusable. Wikipedia was the most functional Web 2.0 site I tried, even with all my JavaScript add-ons. Google AdWords was painful, Yahoo! Marketing Solutions was hellish, and Microsoft adCenter wouldn’t even load. BaseCamp and FreshBooks both worked well.

The big idea here is that you shouldn’t assume website users have the same bandwidth that you do. Lots of people visit websites via mobile phones, public hotspots, and overloaded corporate networks. If your site demands less bandwidth, you’ll have more happy campers.

How does this relate to search? Search is inherently competitive. Users get a search engine results page (SERPs) full of choices. If somebody has a restricted bandwidth situation and your site loads slowly, there’s a huge risk that they’ll hit the back button and try a different site. I did a lot of that last week.

Have you ever wondered what causes users to bounce? Most SEOs think about ways to improve page relevancy to the search query and how to grab the users’ attention. Those are good tactics, but they aren’t the whole story. Some bounces happen even before the users see content. Your server may receive a request and transmit the page, but the user has already hit the back button before the page renders.

Search engines put tracking code on SERP links. They can tell when a user clicks the back button and chooses a different page. Google has even said that they incorporate user behavior data into their ranking algorithms. While they won’t confirm using this particular “signal”, measuring bounce rates seems like an obvious way to judge page quality. When your pages have a high bounce rate, in addition to losing those visitors, your search rankings may suffer.

Here are a few ways to make your website perform on a slow connection, and potentially grab traffic from less savvy competitors:

• Graphics should support your message. Use them sparingly on most sites.
• Optimize graphics to reduce file size. Whether you choose a JPG, GIF or PNG format will affect the file size, as will the quality of the output image. Reducing image quality slightly can make the files much smaller.
• Most browsers cache image files, so run-of-site graphics only need to be downloaded once. If you avoid using different design elements from page to page, your site will probably load faster.
• Use external style sheets to control formatting and layout whenever possible. A style sheet only needs to load once. Inline and page head CSS definitions are repeatedly downloaded with each page view. HTML formatting commands are also repeatedly loaded with each page.
• Keep page length reasonable. Break up large pages by sub-topic, and refrain from overloading pages with excessive detail.
• Keep layouts as simple as possible while getting the job done.
• Eliminate unnecessary features on interactive pages. JavaScript and rich media can tie up lots of bandwidth. Consider using progressive enhancement.
• Move JavaScript to external .js files. These files only need to load once per session. Inline JavaScript loads with every page view.
• Eliminate redirects whenever possible to reduce the number of requests to the server.
• Delete unnecessary code, and clean up code by running it through HTML Tidy.

If you want to see how your site performs, try the SEO Consultants Directory’s free URI Valet service. You can test your pages for speed and see how the different page elements add to bandwidth demands.

Jonathan Hochman has two computer science degrees from Yale. He runs an Internet marketing consultancy and a web development shop.

Microsoft provided some details about what they are looking for in a patent filing from September, Mobile friendly internet searches. They note there that they will only index some pages for their mobile search. And Google…

Google underscores that same point in a patent filing from this last week.

I have more about the patent application and some of the details in an SEO by the Sea post: How Google Might Decide to Index Your Site for Mobile Search.