Is Your Website Mobile Ready Or Losing Money

Posted by Powder Dog

December 22, 2009

These days as webmasters we need to take advantage of every evolution taking place on the Internet. Probably the most important thing that we all need to remember is that more and more people are accessing the Internet over their mobile devices. Some reports suggest that 100 million Internet ready mobile devices could be online by 2013.
The so-called traditional way of using the Internet is at home for most, but more and more users are discovering that they can use the Internet over there cell phones and mobile devices with ease.
The fact that more and more people will be online using their mobile devices will increase the traffic on the Internet tremendously. One of the reasons this will happen is that mobile web apps and operating systems depend on the Internet to operate properly. Most of the newer devices and apps that operate the entire time that the phone is turned on. In fact some need a app to shut them down to save battery life. The increase of traffic on the Internet to mobile devices is evident by the fact that AT&T plans on charging for bandwidth usage over their mobile devices. Networks are becoming overwhelmed from users accessing the Internet everything from shopping to searching.
As webmasters we all need to take advantage of this new mobile revolution. We need to make sure our websites are compatible with cell phone operating systems. With so many people coming online through their cell phones around the world you would be at a clear disadvantage do not have a mobile version of your website. Having a mobile version of your website ensures that as many visitors as possible (know matter where they come from) can navigate around your site and find what they need.
Asked questions of yourself about your website.
Does it render on a mobile devices?
Can your visitors navigate without hitting links with there finger? This is by far the most annoying things for mobile web users. If your user keeps hitting links taking them off what they are reading they will most likely never come back.
Does your site have a mobile version as a add-on or subdomain with a mobile version?
If you run WordPress does your blog have a mobile device plug-in?

If the answer is no to any of these questions you really need to do some research immediately. If you run WordPress you can find a plug-in that will work with your website. WordPress has at least three good mobile website plug-ins that we have found by doing a simple search in the WordPress admin. Just look under add plug-ins in your WordPress administration.

If you opt to have a subdomain or add-on domain or even a folder or file on your site you also need to consider proper search engine optimizing.

We don’t need to worry about SEO as much for the WordPress plug-in’s as much as we do with a subdomain or folder. If it’s a subdomain or folder the search engine’s could see the content on your site twice and consider it duplicate content.

We all know that duplicate content is bad for our websites. So as a webmaster we must figure out a way to even stop the crawler from accessing your mobile version with robot text or a mod in your htaccess.txt file.

Fortunately Google has a mobile blog for mobile enterprise and also has published some videos of how to approach the Mobile Web in Webmaster Tools Video Channel.

There is no one way to make websites mobile friendly. Every website needs to be treated differently. If you have a lot of coding experience processes can be very easy but if you don’t you may need to hire someone to help you. If you jump right in and start adding folders to your website or sub-domains without making sure that your SEO is correct and that the site renders properly on most phones you could just be wasting your time and also breaking your site within the Google search. You should do your research but do your research get it done this is very important as you will be losing money for every visitor that appears to your site on a cell phone that can access the information you are providing.

As the mobile phone revolution gets into full swing webmasters need to stay informed and up to date on the latest mobile devices that users may use to access their websites.
Here are some links to relevant posts on Google.

Reunifying duplicate content on your website
Handling legitimate cross-domain content duplication
Help Google index your mobile site

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