In reality, with Google’s Old Possum/Skip Redirect update in December, user agent redirection is all that’s necessary for mobile sites to rank ahead of desktop sites in smartphone search, even if it’s the same content formatted differently.

With canonical tags back to the desktop site for duplicate mobile pages, both mobile and desktop pages will be able to rank for competitive terms. As I’ve said often in this column, and as Google has said elsewhere, it’s a different paradigm in mobile search, and mobile sites are not, by definition, duplicate content.

However, there are duplicate content issues in mobile SEO that don’t exist in traditional or desktop SEO. These issues will split link equity within a mobile site.

Though this will likely not be a problem for mobile duplicates that are properly redirected, these issues could make it more difficult for your unique mobile URLs to rank, and could result in less link equity being passed to your desktop pages from your duplicate mobile URLs.

If your mobile site exhibits any of these seven common characteristics, you could have canonicalization issues that make your desktop and unique mobile content less competitive in search.

1.  App Interstitials

Many sites promote their mobile app when searchers try to access mobile Web content, taking them to a page created for users of their platform before taking them to the home page.

For example, Open Table takes Android users to an Android page and iPhone users to an iPhone page, and both of these pages are indexed in Google.

Does your mobile site have one of these? You could be splitting link equity.

Like Flash intro splash pages in the early days of this century, there’s a possibility( however remote) that users will link to and share the platform-specific URLs rather than the home page. This can split link equity of one of your strongest pages, making it less competitive in search.

Some companies get around this issue by promoting the app within the page rather than taking the searcher to a separate URL. Others get around it by making a mobile Web user experience that’s good enough to stand on its own. If you must promote your mobile app on your mobile website, it’s best not to have separate URLs per platform.

2.  Carrier Pages

Years ago on Google’s mobile webmaster guidelines, they warned about creating duplicate pages for each carrier. And though that warning is no longer on their mobile guidelines, many companies are still creating deck-specific content that could dilute link equity.

For example, NBC’s mobile site lists a show recap here that’s exactly the same as this show recap here, with the exception of the return to t-zones text at the bottom of the second page.

NBC.com page for T-mobile's t-zones is a duplicate of another recap page except for two words: t-zones Home

Both of these pages are indexed in Google with their own link equity.

If you must create carrier pages, use the canonical tag; or if the page is parameter-based, use Google parameter handling to let Google know they’re duplicates.

3.  Indexed Legacy Transcoder Duplicates

In the initial rush to go mobile, many companies used solutions like Usablenet as a stopgap solution to allow them to provide some sort of mobile content to their users. For various reasons, including SEO, some of these companies then elected to stop using a transcoder like Usablenet and build a mobile site in-house.

Sears.com is one such case. Usablenet currently has 180,000 pages indexed in Google with Sears.com in the URL, but Sears no longer uses Usablenet to power their mobile site.

In fact, they’ve created a jQuery mobile showcase on m.sears.com, which has 381,000 pages indexed in Google. Many of these Usablenet pages are duplicates with older, potentially more trusted links, and they’re splitting the link equity of the Sears mobile site.

One of 180,000 indexed pages of the legacy Sears Usablenet site

Canonical tags on the Usablenet legacy content could fix this problem, but contacting an old vendor to have them implement changes on a site they no longer generate revenue from is never very easy to do.

4.  Other Cross Domain Duplicates

Though transcoded mobile content seems to be the most common instance of cross domain duplicates, there are other instances where the same content will be hosted on two different domains with no canonical tags to indicate which one the search engines should promote.

For example, if you access CBS Sports mobile site directly you could do it through m.cbssports.com. But if you were to access the same page from T-mobile’s deck, you would see the same content at this URL: http://cbstmobile.mo2do.net/?src=tmobile.

If you were to attempt to access it through search by putting in the keywords [cbs sports mobile], you would find the same content at this URL: http://wap.sportsline.com/

Is this a screenshot of A) m.cbssports.com B) wap.sportsline.com C) cbstmobile.mo2do.net D) all of the above?

Again, the same content on different domains could indicate reduced ability to rank for competitive terms. Best to indicate a canonical site through rel canonical or parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools.

5.  Mobile Site Showcase On Desktop Site

Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NFL all have pages on their desktop sites promoting their mobile websites.

NBA's desktop page promoting their mobile app may appear when mobile searchers are looking for the mobile site.

In spite of Google’s focus on relevance in search results, sometimes these pages intended for a desktop user show up in search results for brand + “mobile site” queries ahead of actual mobile sites.

While these types of pages rarely result in any significant link equity, they can take link equity away from the actual mobile site and make it difficult for it to rank (assuming it’s not a duplicate, which will rank with redirects).

We would love to hear from Google whether pages like this can safely include canonical tags back to the mobile home page, as the content is similar and isn’t something desktop searchers are going to want to find in search. But if the canonical tag is questionable, the pages should at least be excluded or redirected back to the mobile site for mobile users so that they don’t compete with the mobile site in search results.

6.  Duplicate WAP Sites

It’s springtime in America, and many sports fans are rooting for the home team again until the big finish in October.

Do you think any of them can tell the difference between this:

Screenshot of wap.mlb.com

And this?

Screenshot of m.mlb.com. Don't look too hard for differences.

That’s because it’s the same content. The difference is that the former was built for feature phones and the latter was built for smartphones.

These days many companies are building accessible mobile sites at m.domain.com with progressive enhancement in mind, eliminating the need for a duplicate site on a wap.com subdomain.

If you do have a wap site on a separate subdomain (and there are almost 8 million pages indexed on wap.*.com subdomains in Google) the best practice is to use canonical tags to transfer the link equity to one mobile site.

7.  Promoting Mobile Apps Ahead Of Mobile Web Content

Some companies don’t have a mobile website at all, but promote their mobile app instead. There are numerous problems with this strategy that I’ve covered in a past column, but from an SEO standpoint, it often results in creating native app content that can’t be linked to or shared.

So while companies are often duplicating their content and splitting link equity, this particular duplication doesn’t result in any additional links or shares which could ultimately help them rank for competitive terms in search.

If you are creating software or mobile Web functionality that truly can’t be replicated on the mobile Web, by all means build an app. But if you’re just building a stripped down version of your desktop website with mobile searchers in mind, make your mobile content accessible on the Web first.

There isn’t a need to tie promotional activities back to branding metrics, or tricky-to-quantify engagement on the site (“Do we want more page views, or do less views mean the site delivered on the first try?”)

Thanks to that clarity, store owners keep a close eye on their data, and have probably seen mobile devices show-up on their radar a lot more than they used to. Combine that with the buzz around smartphones, and the idea of a store app quickly becomes a topic at the conference room table.

And rightly so. Smartphone users are a highly motivated crowd, and for the time being they represent an audience that is somewhat more upscale. But a smartphone can’t deliver more than the eye can absorb on a 3-4 inch screen, so usability becomes a paramount concern.

Hence the appeal of an app: nothing delivers content with the ease of use and instant response that a native app can provide.

Apps Drive Sales, But What Drives Downloads?

So an app becomes the centerpiece of your new mobile marketing strategy. But is it the whole strategy? To have your app make a dent in sales, you need to get it into people’s hands. There are lots of ways to accomplish that, but simply making a great app and releasing it in the App Store won’t do the trick.

And so it’s time to go back to your metrics – they may be trying to tell you something. Are your new customers coming from search? And is that activity centered around product searches – items you stock that they want? For many store owners, the answer to both questions is yes.

If that’s the case, then you have a great channel for promoting your app, staring you in the face: a mobile-optimized website.

For a lot of companies, having an app and a mobile site might seem like an unnecessary duplication of effort. But when you look at customer acquisition, you can see the value of having your site become a more effective tool for getting first time customers to 1) buy from their phone and 2) download your app for that second purchase.

Or even for the first purchase: if you show customers know that you have a product in stock, plus other products they may be interested in, the positive experience may persuade them to download right now.

Keeping Your Mobile Website Focused

How do we produce a cost-effective mobile site when dollars are already being spent to develop an app? The key here is to focus on the mission at hand: acquiring customers through product search.

Again, back to your metrics: your incoming traffic is probably driven by a handful of top products. So the process of building a mobile store doesn’t have to be a heroic effort to replicate your 1o,000 SKU inventory. Focus on the top 100 products, and use mobile SEO to make those pages perform well in searches for those product names.

Key Features For Mobile SEO

• Mention the product name in your HTML page titles (as you probably do on your desktop website.) But keep it short: Google Mobile only gives you 55 characters to work with (versus 70 for desktop.)
• Re-process your product images to get the files down to the smallest possible size. 50kb JPEGS are an attainable goal if you’re careful with the compression. Google looks at download speed, and factors it into search results.
• Conversely, resist the urge to downsize your product copy. Try to package it as bulleted lists to make it more digestible on a small screen. But don’t leave out details that contains keywords that your customers might use.

Image compression software can help optimize your site for mobile SEO, producing high-quality images that download quickly.

Then decide what the next step should be. Should “Buy Now” be your call-to-action? Should it be “Download Our App”? Or maybe a button for each?

A-B testing will provide the best answer for your particular audience. Either way, you’ve got that mobile user in your store, looking at your inventory, and getting to know you – probably for the first time.

With a coordinated strategy in place, your mobile website can help drive new buyers to download your app, increasing its reach and building a mobile customer base that will come back again and again.

If my colleagues who are also competing with me in search results want to pick a strategy that ultimately will bring them less qualified traffic in search results, honestly, that’s more traffic for me and my clients.

Because when it comes down to it, SEO is not about efficiency, or what the search engines say is easiest, but about what is going to provide the most value to search engine users, which will ultimately result in quality search engine traffic to a site.

Different Context, Different Goals

If you recall last month’s column, I showed another clear example from Walgreens in which desktop search behavior and mobile search behavior are vastly different.

Instead of giving the mobile searcher a reformatted version of their desktop site, with a lot of extraneous code hidden, ultimately slowing the time-starved mobile searcher down, Walgreens elected to present a simplified mobile home page with mobile architecture, mobile features, and mobile keywords.

Likewise, State Farm and eSurance both recognize that their mobile searchers have vastly different goals than their desktop searchers, and elect to provide them different content to improve their user experience.

Sure, they could put all of the content on one URL, but as the founder of responsive Web design, Ethan Marcotte, explained in his book, this approach is “irresponsible”:

We real­ized it would have been irresponsible of us to ask our visitors to download all that extraneous HTML, marking up content that they’d never see, much less benefit from. And I don’t say that just out of concern for mobile visitors: regardless of whether our visitors were on a phone-or a desktop-based browser, we would have been penalizing them with extra markup.

As I describe in more detail in a recent column on Marketing Land called Responsive Web Design Isn’t Meant to Replace Mobile Web Sites, responsive Web design, while great for duplicate pages, is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and was never meant to be.

Sometimes mobile searchers need dedicated mobile content, including a mobile home page and mobile-specific pages that don’t exist on their desktop site.

Responsive Web Design Or Search-Optimized Information Architecture?

Think about how SEO works, and in particular siloing or search-optimized information architecture. At this point, you’re really only eligible for keywords and concepts that you have on your site.

If you’re an insurance company, and your mobile searchers’ primary goal is to get help with towing their car, and you don’t have towing content on your desktop site because your desktop computer users are generally not stuck on the side of the road with an immediate need you can fill, you’re probably not going to get any traffic from search engines when your customers enter the term [towing service] on their smartphones.

This concept is not likely to be included on your desktop site because 73.64% of the searches are coming from mobile devices. For the mobile site, however, it’s probably important enough to be put on the home page, and to have dedicated mobile content addressing it.

If your customers are not putting in different terms and concepts in different frequencies on their mobile devices than they are on their laptops and desktop computers, responsive Web design may be the way to go for you.

The problem is, many of my colleagues in SEO and Web design are recommending responsive Web design in all cases without doing the necessary research to discover whether mobile searchers’ goals are vastly different from desktop searchers’ goals. Because of this, many businesses are losing out on searches from mobile devices that they should be getting. And, people, losing out on qualified search traffic is not SEO.

Mobile Sites ≠ Duplicate Content

Still worried about split link equity making it difficult for your mobile site to rank? Don’t be, as it’s a non-issue in Google. With December’s skip redirect/Old Possum update, mobile URLs that are properly redirected will be ranked in the mobile (feature phone or smartphone) search results regardless of link equity.

I know it’s difficult for people like us who spend so much time consolidating link equity to grasp, but mobile URLs really are different. This is the one thing Google has been consistent on when it comes to mobile SEO. Not sure how many times I have to point this out before SEOs stop revealing to us that mobile URLs split link equity.

Fortunately the entire industry isn’t losing their minds over responsive Web design. There are a number of us who are making the responsible and optimal choice to serve mobile sites on mobile URLs when the users’ goals call for it.

Adam Audette was brave enough to say in Clickz this month, “The best approach to mobile is a hybrid model that caters content delivery to the specific needs of the user. In some cases, having dedicated, mobile-specific sites and content is the right thing to do.”

Meanwhile, Duane Forrester of Bing, though he wrote a strong recommendation for responsive Web design rather than duplicating URLs, stopped short of recommending it in all cases: “Occasionally, it may make sense to keep some URLs targeted at specific clients (e.g. mobile devices)”.

Possible Algorithmic Advantage To Having Dedicated Mobile Site

Apart from all of this, there may even be an algorithmic advantage to having a dedicated mobile site. In an upcoming white paper examining the top three search results for competitive non-brand queries in Google smartphone search, Resolution Media found that 64% of the ranking sample had dedicated mobile sites.

When you consider that just 21% of Google’s top advertisers have mobile sites, there are a disproportionately high number of top ranking smartphone sites that offer mobile content.

Correlation does not equal causation, of course, but Bing’s Rangan Majumder revealed at SMX West this year that mobile sites do rank above desktop sites in Bing mobile search, all else being equal; and Google has a blended mobile ranking algorithm and admits differences in search results for different platforms, though they’ve been reluctant to speak with one voice on whether they favor mobile sites in search results.

Relevance is still the goal, and as long as there are so many unusable sites that have relevant answers, no search engine is going to prevent that content from ranking. But as more webmasters see the opportunity in mobile, and develop mobile content to meet that opportunity, more sites will be both relevant to mobile searchers and usable.

When this day comes, why would the engines continue to serve content that requires additional pinching and zooming, or slows down the page load time because of additional markup, when they have a number of URLs that are both relevant and usable to choose from?

If you want to jump on the bandwagon and favor responsive design in all cases, in spite of all of this, that’s really your decision to make. If you want less qualified traffic, that’s up to you. But as an SEO consultant who is primarily concerned with bringing my clients the most qualified traffic possible, that’s not a recommendation that I can make to them, and that’s not a recommendation that I can in good conscience make to all of you.

If you want the most search traffic from mobile search, don’t think “one URL to rule them all;” think “what do mobile searchers need?” In many cases, your answer will be not responsive Web design, but an approach that includes mobile URLs.

Leveraging multinational markup while clearing up in-site duplicate content and avoiding multinational homepage calamities is no easy matter to coordinate for big site SEO.

Bringing all of those strategies to bear, and then also attempting to integrate a mobile site strategy would seem, on the face of it, to be a difficult task.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Mobile Sites, Feature Phones & The Smartphone Revolution

We are fortunate to be living through a time of radical change for mobile website optimisation.

Every year since 2003-2004, I’ve heard well respected industry figures declaim the ‘Year of Mobile’, only to be sorely disappointed when it comes down to looking at where their client’s online revenue is being generated (with the notable exception of gaming, of course).

The last couple of years have seen mobile-derived revenue finally push on to the point where we are genuinely on the cusp of smartphones (and of course tablets) taking centre stage.

This is especially true for retailers. And you can multiply that sentiment by 10 for multinational brand retailers.

So why now?

If you’ve ever tried to make a purchase through a feature phone (AKA: a ‘dumb’ phone), then you’ll know the answer.

Smartphones and tablets provide a genuinely convenient and pleasurable shopping experience, whether via applications or HTML5, or simply thanks to clever adaptive CSS styling.

They also allow big sites to avoid the common SEO pitfalls of deploying a specially created ‘Mobile’ website intended for feature forms. To demonstrate my point, step forward UK hardware supplier B&Q, owners of the SEO friendly domain ‘diy.com’.

The Pitfalls Of Mobile Content Duplication

Using our site operators we can drill through B&Q’s domain to spot the issue created by their current mobile deployment.

We can see that for a domain with 937,000 indexed pages initially listed in Google’s cache, a chunk of 50,000 are caused by the entirely duplicate m.diy.com subdomain: their mobile website.

(Of course, a rather larger chunk of 108,000 are caused by their ‘Asset Bank’ feature: if you’re reading B&Q, please do check out the clearing up website duplication tips I linked to earlier.)

We can also see that because the mobile site is cached in Google’s main index, they will return pages like this and this for users searching on desktop computers, creating extremely bad brand experiences and the cause of massive bounce rate issues which have a knock on effect on the domain’s SEO value as a whole.

A B&Q mobile page indexed in Google's main SERPs.

Effectively, the poor performance of the mobile pages will damage the performance of the ‘main’ website pages. So rather than providing value by being useful for feature phone users (who tend not to make a purchase via their phones anyway), they in fact detract value and lower sales.

So why has this happened and what’s the solution?

B&Q have done the right thing: they are catering to their customers regardless of their browsing device. This is a good thing.

Unfortunately, they have not followed Google’s advice for registering mobile only pages in their mobile search engine. And so, they have ended up creating issues and failing to reach their intended audience.

By listing their mobile URLS in a Mobile sitemap.xml, and using (and declaring!) a mobile markup standard such as XHTML MP 1.2, cHTML or WML 1.3, B&Q could disambiguate their mobile content from their destop-intended pages and Google would reflect that in their indexing.

For a belt and braces approach (always preferred if you ask me!), using the robots.txt to restrict access to the m.diy.com subdomain to mobile user-agents only (for example Googlebot-mobile) would prevent the poor brand experience and SEO duplication issues in their tracks.

A Modern Mobile Website

However, if you are contemplating building a mobile site today, then I’d suggest you do none of these things, and instead break out a bit of CSS3.

By indicating the ‘media’ value for your stylesheets using CSS3 mediaqueries, you can pass different stylesheets based on the width of the browser used. For example, a value of “max-device-width:480px” would mean the contents are only used for the most common smartphone browser width.

You could be as granular as you like and provide small and full-size tablet width layouts, or indeed provide a unique layout for very wide monitor widths for more high value boutique brands looking to make a splash when visited by higher net worth individuals. The possibilities are extensive.

So detecting the user-agent (your browser, for example) display width is a snap, and serving different styling to a well structured XHTML (or, even better, HTML5) page means to can use exactly the same content – and therefore URLs – for your desktop or mobile devices. So, no duplication.

With HTML5′s additional strength as a surrogate phone/table app replacement, building to this specification allows extremely valuable future linkbait promotion of features without the additional expense of specific device application development.

We use that approach on QueryClick’s company website, so try it out in different devices (and of course feel free to copy out the code for your own purposes, I’d be pleased to hear what you make of it) and see how it scales from mobile, through to desktop all with just a small change in the CSS.

Mobile marketing must seem that way to a lot of companies, and as a result, far too many of them are sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, there are a few vendors out there offering a shortcut to the mobile Web:  a turnkey publishing platform that allows a marketer to quickly deploy mobile landing pages.

The question is: how effective are these pages in the context of mobile search?

The Case For Mobile Landing Pages

Turnkey landing pages are usually considered because of special circumstance:

• Budget. When most dollars get spent to support desktop sites, the remainder may not actually be enough to support a full-blown mobile effort.
• Direct response campaigns. Sometimes a media campaign concept drives the need for mobile landing pages to catch the resulting traffic. QR codes at trade show booths, mobile offers sent via text, and even plain-old PPC ads can drive the need for a quickly-built mobile site.

The systems available to deploy mobile landing pages change every month. So rather than single-out a single platform and dissect its features, let’s look at the factors you’ll want to keep in mind when evaluating and using these services.

Laying A Foundation

The first thing you’ll want to investigate is whether or not these landing pages can be read by a search engine. Here are a few features to look at closely:

• Dynamic Pages. Some turnkey systems use dynamic pages to quickly create pages that can respond to campaigns or even individual ads. Dynamic pages include lots of parameters in their URLs, and can cause problems for mobile search, just as they do in the desktop world.
• On-Page Coding. Mobile landing pages sometimes use special coding to create a seamless app-like experience. I’ve talked about JQuery Mobile in the past, and there are other frameworks such as XUI, JQTouch, not to mention plain-vanilla JavaScript. These schemes don’t get a 100% thumbs-up or thumbs-down – it depends on how they are used. The key is to ensure that your landing pages are actually composed of distinct pages, instead of a single downloadable page with a chameleon-like ability to alter its content.
• Navigation. If your turnkey site is built to catch campaign traffic, it may just be a collection of free-standing landing pages, with links to connect them to each other. If that’s the case, you won’t benefit from the SEO support these pages would lend to each other. Furthermore, without nav links, you may lose a connection back to the home page, which typically has the strongest SEO scoring.
• Flash. Flash is not usually employed on these sites (thank you Steve Jobs) so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Getting There From Here

Looking at all the points above, you might get the impression that optimizing your mobile landing pages will be an end in itself. And it partially is: you’ll be living with them for a while, so it’s worthwhile to see what sort of SEO performance can be extracted from it.

But you can also take a broader view. If the turnkey site and its campaigns are successful, it’s likely that more mobile projects will follow, including the creation of a more comprehensive “official” mobile website.

With that in mind, your turnkey site can be considered a precursor, one that can be used to lay a foundation for the construction of a future brand presence.

A bit of preparation can help to make that happen:

• Domain Name.  Try to anticipate the URL that will be used for your future mobile site. If you can start using that URL today, you’ll create a footprint that will help search engines discover your next website more quickly. Conversely, you should talk to your vendor if they suggest a URL based on *their* domain name, because you may lose access to it when you transition to your next mobile website.
• Recyclable URLs. What works at the site level also works at the page level. Choosing locations for landing pages that will echo the page locations of a future website will also help smooth the transition. Granted, it’s hard to predict what your future site will look like, but for basic pages like “About Us” or pages promoting on your bread-and-butter product lines, some predictions can be made.

Your short-term mobile landing pages (left) may not have as much content as your future mobile website (right.) But the more they resemble each other in structure, the better your mobile SEO will be down the road.

Altogether, mobile landing pages are a great tactic for getting yourself into the mobile space. And with advance planning, that short-term success can be leveraged into an asset that can feed into successive projects, creating a win-win for both mobile search and your time-to-market.

But when I added the word “Apple” to the headline, it completely changed its dynamics — just like Apple does every time it enters a new business area.

So, I must be talking about Siri right? Wrong. I agree actually that Siri is a really important development, but Apple has much more up its sleeve than just Siri.

What Does Apple Have Up Its Sleeve?

On the 23rd of February, Techcrunch followed by the Financial Times reported that Apple had paid $50 million to acquire a start-up called “Chomp”, whose homepage is shown below.

Chomp is an app search engine where you can find apps using keyword search. Intriguingly, it covers both iPhone and iPad along with Android.

Chomp Is The New Global Search Engine Due To Launch Soon

The image below shows how Chomp currently presents listings (that’s rankings right?) for apps giving you their ratings and clearly identifying if they are free are not.

The team which created Chomp is already working at Apple on the company’s plan to replace the current “App Stores” with Chomp or a version of it.

Chomp Shows Apps Trending In Popularity And Algorithmically Selects Categories

A little testing of Chomp reveals that it is a little more sensitive to keywords than the App Stores themselves – but much needs to be done. Don’t forget, there are now well over half a billion apps which have been downloaded over 25 billion times.

For “apps” read “websites” and for listings read “rankings”, this is big world search and its happening all over again. The app world is now bigger than Google was in the year 2000 when Google had indexed one billion pages — since an app typically has several “pages”.

“Expect To Be Penalized For Abusing Our Rankings!”

Apple is already releasing warnings to app developers saying, “You should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”

That is such an uncanny parallel of warnings which Google gave to users of analysis and positioning software in the early years including that they would have their websites de-indexed.

Search For Apps By Keyword

Although Chomp’s multilingual capability is currently still sadly lacking (as was Google’s before 2006), the image below suggests that the potential for rolling this out successfully globally is just vast. Don’t forget, Apple already has the apps “indexed”, it just needs to provide greater access to them via a more effective search paradigm.

Multilingual Keyword Search Works - Sort Of

The Big Question Is: Will Apple Keep Android Listings?

Chomp currently lists Android apps too. The big question is whether Apple will continue this with some revised version of the App Store. I suspect they will close down the Android side — even though I believe this would be a strategic error.

Obviously users of Android phones only really want to find listings which will work on the Android platform — and vice versa for iPhone and iPad users. But if you’re looking for a solution for a particular business problem, wouldn’t it make sense if you could search for that before choosing which phone you buy?

A universal search engine also builds better brand loyalty and would, in my view, enable Apple to stay firmly in charge of the market which they created.

Some Brands Will Clearly Be Winners!

Above, you can see how one brand marketer is already benefitting through German language searches in targeting the Austrian market.

This image is included solely to help you visualize the potential, particularly if you’re a brand marketer in a world where even Google says that more than 50% of searches will eventually come from a mobile device with more than a billion people globally using them.

Will Keyword Search Become Part Of The Mix?

Chomp Already Offers Keyword Search Advertising

You may not be aware of it, but Chomp already offers keyword advertising. What a fantastic tool for Apple to make more money from apps in which it then shares a margin for every sale. In this context, Apple is a step ahead of Google.

But this is also a big opportunity for advertisers and search marketers to get involved right now as this market develops.

Keyword Research Is Already Possible

See below for some rather rudimentary data which Chomp publishes on popular searches. You can already see the lack of sophistication from searchers using Chomp since it doesnt really make sense that “Apps” is so frequently a component of the keyword — in a search engine which, for now, only lists apps.

Rough And Ready Keyword Search Is Already Available

What The Chomp Team Needs To Fix

There have always been weaknesses in the App Store and Chomp doesn’t solve all of them. For international search marketers, they need to fix the following:

• Geo-targeting by country – for searchers and advertisers
• Geo-targeting by language – for searchers and advertisers
• Much more relevant search results
• More effective social sharing

I’m pretty puzzled (please explain someone) why more of us are not talking about this. The game is about to start – it’s time to get on board!

How? Here are a few ideas which might help:

• Analyse the keyword searches on Chomp to better understand the mobile user
• Develop and launch an app or two
• Advertise against keyword searches on Chomp
• Review strategies to see if apps can replace web investments

Don’t forget that people who are searching Chomp are searching for solutions. They have a need to solve — just like any searcher at Google!

What Are The Mobile SEO URL Options?

1. Same URL or One URL strategy
2. An m. subdomain
3. A third party site for mobile pages
4. A .mobi TLD

Why Is The One URL Strategy Better For Mobile SEO?

With the large enterprise companies we work with at Covario, our position has been to recommend the one URL or same URL approach over the m. subdomain.

The one URL approach for mobile has also been recently echoed as a preferred choice by both Bing officially and Google unofficially.

This approach requires user agent detection to trigger different rendering of the page based on the mobile device type which can also include the DocType and HEAD section of the code. Google specifically affirmed this is not cloaking back in their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

The key is to change these sections for feature phones and smartphones as Google has two different mobile crawlers for these devices since the search results between feature phones and smartphones do differ from each other, as well as from the standard desktop search engine ranking results.

To be proactive, it is best to do this as well for tablets and TV rendering, which should get specific crawlers from the search engines in the near future.

In the end, why is this single URL approach better for mobile SEO?

• Link empowerment since all the link equity would be consolidated into one URL
• Mobile URLs rarely have much link equity on their own
• A URL being in an m. does not inherently have any advantage in mobile search
• Google and Bing have both affirmed its not cloaking to show different content on the same URL for the different mobile device types
• There is no need to create a subdomain every time there is a new device type
• Results in reduced load on your web server; and
• Definitively establishes a direct relationship of the different mobile renderings to your desktop instance

When Is An m. Subdomain A Better Option?

Using a subdomain for your mobile rendering is a close “1B” option to the one URL strategy and could be the preferred direction in many circumstances.

If you are only going to have a limited mobile site that doesn’t have a one-to-one relationship to your desktop instance, then having a subdomain for mobile would make sense.

Also, if your site already has a long established mobile subdomain the advantages of bringing it to the one URL does diminish.

The disadvantage is that you would need to have user agent detection on both your www- desktop instance as well your m. mobile instance to properly redirect the user to the other based on their device.

Then, you would need that user agent detection on the mobile subdomain to trigger different mobile content on the same mobile URL for feature phone and smartphone users.

Finally, you would then need to create a subdomain for each future device thus a tablet. subdomain then a tv. subdomain and possibly in the future a car. subdomain or appliance. subdomain.

There are of course, differing views on the one URL strategy, including that of my fellow columnist Bryson Meunier, who does prefer the the m. subdomain over the same URL strategy overall and I’m sure he will further expand on his position why in a future post.

Why Use A Third Party Site For Mobile Or A .Mobi TLD?

Using a third party site for your mobile pages such as Google’s mobile site service should only be a stopgap solution until you can capably provide mobile pages under your own domain, which is SEO 101.

As far as an SEO reason to use a .Mobi TLD for your mobile instance, the answer is the same to any inferred advantage this TLD has in the mobile results…none.

The trouble is potentially two-fold: not only is it hard to track visitors, but once Google’s December changes take effect, it may be hard to attract those visitors in the first place.

One common source of this tracking problem is the series of redirects that make-up the desktop-to-mobile switchboard.

Three aspects of this switchboard are worth checking:

• 301 redirects.  SEO’s are no stranger to the 301 redirect. But in a mobile situation, you might have your doubts. If the web server is 301-ing mobile traffic to your m-dot URLs, does that disrupt the indexing process for the desktop site? And what about link equity? Actually, Google expects this pattern and it’s perfectly safe, but only if you…
• Manage user agents. To manage mobile traffic, you need to know for sure that they’re on a phone. User agents – ID strings that identify your web browser – are the industry-standard technique for sniffing-out a phone. To make this work properly for mobile search, your user agent list should be complete and up to date. This should include the defacto “devices” that GoogleBot-Mobile uses to perform its mobile indexing. If you don’t treat GoogleBot-Mobile like a phone, you’ll accidentally serve-up your desktop page, possibly getting dinged for mobile performance factors like long load time.
• One-to-one mapping. Redirects can be seen as the roads connecting your pages, and how your roads are laid-out can have a significant effect on how users and engines get around your site. GoogleBot-Mobile looks for redirects that connect matching pages, and will make a point to show your mobile URL as your search listing. If your redirects don’t map to specific pages (i.e. sending everyone to the mobile home page) you run the risk of never showing “m.website.com” in the SERPs. It’s still too early in the game to cite studies on this, but it stands to reason that a lack of m-dot URLs will quickly become a quality signal to both user and engines that your site isn’t mobile-friendly.

Google still shows desktop URLs for both mobile searches (left) and desktop searches (right), but the switchboard action that helps send users to the right destination can sometimes result in a loss of tracking data.

One last comment about 301 redirects, and why they’re especially important in this context. A lot of web developers bemoan the SEO industry’s (and Google’s) insistence on 301 redirects as the one best option for managing traffic. But for mobile tracking it’s even more important, because of the way HTTP server codes are handled.

301′s Keep Your Data Connected

With a 301, the referring URL that got users to Page-A is automatically copied over to Page-B’s referrer. From a metrics perspective, this is a great convenience: instead of having to track how a user hopscotched through the redirect, you can just look at the 1) real source of the traffic, and 2) the real landing page of the user.

With other types of redirects (302, JavaScript, meta-refresh) no such copying of the referrer data is performed. Therefore the data is lost – and that could be why you only see your desktop site in your traffic data. You’re only seeing the hopscotch, instead of the true source of your mobile traffic.

Bottom line, these steps will go a long way toward cleaning-up your metrics, and help you to better weigh the mobile site’s impact. They’ve been tested in both Google Analytics and Omniture to good effect, but if you’ve had experiences with other tracking tools (good or bad) please share them in the comments.

If you’re a regular reader of this column and you don’t have a mobile experience, you are in the majority of site owners; but you’re also way behind and may not be able to catch up if you wait much longer.

So are you ready? Let’s talk about the ideal set up for your mobile site for SEO purposes.

There are cheaper, easier solutions, but this is the one that I would recommend to webmasters looking not just for a mobile friendly solution, but something that’s truly optimized to bring in traffic from mobile searchers.

If you want to build a mobile site in a way that will increase your organic search engine traffic, this is how to do it.

1. Make It Truly Mobile

Before you even think about subdomain options, you better know your mobile user: the person who you’re building this for who will ultimately make it a success or failure.

What are they looking for and why? Use the AdWords keyword tool to get mobile volumes and desktop volumes for keywords related to your brand, and to your products and services, and then find the mobile percent of total volume, or the mobile ratio, as Sherwood Stranieri put it. This gives you a sense of what concepts and keywords overindex with smartphone and mobile searchers, and it will help you build more than a desktop experience.

For example, for Walgreens, it’s clear from their brand keywords that index high among mobile searchers that the majority of searchers are looking for a Walgreens near them. It’s clear from the volume of queries where more than 30% of the total volume is mobile (smartphone and feature phone):

And it’s clear from a long tail analysis of the same list:

These are highly qualified searchers, as they’re very likely to convert offline, so why not make it as easy for them as possible?

Now that we know what our mobile users want, we can design the mobile site so that it provides those things with ease. And this will differ for all businesses, but it’s likely to be different from how your desktop website is structured.

Walgreens seems to know this, as they designed their mobile website differently than their desktop website, specifically taking advantage of the unique capabilities of a mobile device.

Instead of having their mobile searcher find a site with a lot of irrelevant content crammed on to one page that’s intended for desktop users, they’ve highlighted those areas that are most relevant to the mobile user experience.

For example, instead of doing nothing with their site and hoping that a mobile searcher finds the sections they’re looking for (which I’ve highlighted in red in the second image):

Walgreens has presented a simplified version of the home page that highlights those areas of the site that are most relevant to the mobile user experience:

When you hit the “find near me” button, it uses the phone’s GPS to find the locations closest to you, taking advantage of the specific functionality of mobile browsers rather than completely transcoding the desktop site with desktop functionality to look good on mobile browsers (i.e. responsive design).

Walgreens.com isn’t the paragon of mobile SEO, unfortunately, as they’ve done a lot of things wrong when it comes to the findability of their mobile site. With the design they really should have included a small keyword-rich text box that conveys the relevance of the page to users and search engines, as there’s not a lot of text or keywords on the page to help search engines understand that it’s relevant for what search engine users are looking for.

For some brands, there may also be concepts and keywords that aren’t included in the desktop site that need to be linked to from the homepage.

I’m guessing this is because the page was designed with users rather than SEO in mind, as someone hired the non-search-friendly mobile platform Usablenet to design the site and disallowed it in the robots.txt file so that it only appears in search engines when you put in the navigational keyword [m walgreens com].

They also promote the app over the mobile site by sending the searcher to a splash page first, which isn’t good for users or search engines.

Nonetheless, like State Farm and too few other companies, they did build a separate mobile user experience rather than used stylesheets to serve a formatted desktop experience, which is the first big step to getting a search-optimized mobile site.

2. Create A Hybrid Of Mobile-Optimized & Mobile-Friendly Content

Once you’ve settled on the design and site architecture, you need to determine the best way to host your mobile site. Though there are many opinions on the matter, the best solution is to host your mobile homepage and mobile-only pages at m.domain.com subdomain or /m subfolder.

For all other pages with content that won’t change from desktop to mobile, it’s perfectly acceptable to keep them at the same URL as your desktop and simply reformat them for mobile user agents. Redirects work fine too, but the best practice for transcoded desktop URLs is currently to add canonical tags to pass the link equity back to desktop pages.

For mobile only pages that are not strict duplicates, canonical tags are unnecessary, and could make your most valuable pages invisible to searchers.

3. Redirect Appropriately

For mobile-only content, you’ll need to set up the proper redirects. My colleague Cindy Krum has a handy tool for PHP and .NET redirects that makes it easy for novices to set up mobile redirects.

When Googlebot comes by, serve it your desktop content; but when her sisters Googlebot mobile and smartphone Googlebot arrive, give them your feature phone site (if you have one) and your smartphone site, respectively.

If you have a tablet site, by all means serve it to tablet searchers instead of your desktop or smartphone site, but there currently is no tablet Googlebot to receive your tablet site.

If you don’t have a tablet site, serve your tablet searchers desktop content, as research shows that’s what they respond to best. Just make sure you’ve removed all traces of Flash before serving it up to the iPad or other tablets that don’t support Flash.

4. Don’t Forget the Images!

It has been a long time since mobile SEO was about optimizing WAP sites, and in the near future we may be optimizing for a literal pair of Google Goggles, with a Terminator-like overlay that searches for more information on the things around us, just by analyzing images and comparing them to Google’s image and Google Goggles image database.

SEOs can prepare for this brave new world today by ensuring images are optimized for mobile searchers.

5. Analyze & Optimize

Sure, there are mobile SEO best practices beyond this, but best practices only go so far. If you want to retain the edge that optimizing your site in this way gives you, you can’t just set it and forget it.

Given how rapidly this practice is changing, and how much it has changed in the last five or six years, mobile SEO requires regularly looking to your web analytics and to columns like those in the Mobile Search section in Search Engine Land in order to stay optimized.

There are many ways to go mobile, and many of them will actually hurt your visibility among mobile searchers. If you create mobile content when appropriate, redirect appropriately, optimize your images for mobile searchers, and analyze your site for new opportunities, there won’t be many mobile webmasters who will be able to compete with you in natural search.

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.