SEO for Mobile How do you let know about the mobile version of your site? (Onsite Optimisation)

As a follow-up to the previous post on “Why care about SEO for Mobile” (http://toolbox.schibsted.com/?p=13178), we will start with some onsite optimisation tactics mostly technical with some similarities on the desktop optimisation. Before we think of how we will rank significantly on the mobile search engines, it is a great need if we think first of how do we appear on search engines. Here we will cover actions that will affect the indexation of our mobiles urls and be discoverable by the search engines.

#1 Submission to Google Webmaster tools

Verify Your Mobile Site in Google Webmastertools, the same way as how you verify on the desktop version. This works for mobile sites with separate mobile urls and it’s very helpful for getting data specifically about the mobile site.

Just log on to your google webmaster tools account and select the add site. There you will see the procedures provided by Google on how to verify your site.

Webmastertools login page: http://goo.gl/ZIRWE

#2 Mobile URLs

Two types of mobile website:

Responsive Web design

Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device.

Websites with Separate Mobile URLs (Used by some SCM websites)

In this configuration, each desktop URL has an equivalent different URL serving mobile- optimized content. A common setup would be pages on www.example.com serving desktop users having corresponding m.example.com pages serving mobile users. Google does not favor any particular URL format as long as they are all accessible to both and Googlebot-Mobile.

#3 Mobile Annotations

To help the understand this configuration on your site, you have to put some annotations both on the web and mobile pages with support from the annotations on sitemaps.

Annotation in the HTML:

1. On the desktop page, add a special link rel="alternate" tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This helps Googlebot discover the location of your site's mobile pages.

2. On the mobile page, add a link rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.

Annotation in Sitemaps:

Putting rel="alternate" annotation for the desktop pages in Sitemaps like this:

This two-way ("bidirectional") annotation helps Googlebot discover your content and helps the algorithms understand the relationship between your desktop and mobile pages and treat them accordingly.

When you use different URLs to serve the same content in different formats, the annotation tells Google's algorithms that those two URLs have equivalent content and should be treated as one entity instead of two entities. If they are treated separately, both desktop and mobile URLs are shown in desktop search results, and their positions may be lower than they would otherwise be

#4 Mobile Sitemap

In case you want to create a separate google webmastertools account for your mobile site. You can use a separate sitemap intended only for mobile urls then submit it to Google webmaster tools

A Mobile Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, along with a specific tag and an additional namespace requirement. Note that the Mobile Sitemap format is changing. We recommend that you update your Mobile Sitemaps to the format below as soon as you can.

A sample Mobile Sitemap containing listing a single entry is shown below.

The only real distinction here is the addition of the tag. Otherwise it is very similar to a typical XML sitemap.

Ex: http://www.google.com/mobilesitemap.xml

Notes According to Google Webmastertools:

 If you plan to use a Sitemap creation tool, you should check to see that it can create Mobile Sitemaps.  A Mobile Sitemap can contain only URLs that serve mobile web content. Any URLs that serve only non-mobile web content will be ignored by the Google crawling mechanisms. If you have non-mobile content, create a separate Sitemap for those URLs.  If the tag is missing, your mobile URLs won't be properly crawled.

 URLs serving multiple markup languages can be listed in a single Sitemap.  Each Mobile Sitemap must have a unique name.  If you use our Sitemap Generator to create your Mobile Sitemaps, you'll need to create a separate config file for each Mobile Sitemap.

#5 Robots.txt

One main reason for mobile urls being unable to be included on the index is the possibility of being blocked under the robots.txt file. If you like your site to be crawled, you have to allow any User-agent including "Googlebot-Mobile" to access your site. Googlebot-Mobile is the crawler for mobile site while for desktop site it is Googlebot.

Ex:

User-agent: Googlebot-mobile Allow: / Disallow: User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: / Sitemap: http://m.website.com/sitemap.gz

*this is just a sample to show the user agent googlebot-mobile was intended to crawl the mobile sitemap. It doesn’t necessarily to be exactly this format.

References: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/search/label/mobile https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details http://www.ehow.com/how_10072697_use-301-redirect-mobile.html