Mobile SEO

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What is Mobile Seo?

Last week at MEM08, I started to talk about my very small Mobile Seo business. A lot of people said, I didn’t know you were an online SEO – how to do you do it?

Others said what is SEO and in the same breath – can you get me to the top of Google?

So, unlike many SEO’s out there that have entered mobile from online – I am in a very unique position. I am a self taught online SEO. But, with nearly 15 years of experience in mobile and four years in the mobile search business – my positioning and mobile seo services come with a twist.

For me, I try to optimise mobile sites purely on mobile. I care about to rank higher on Yahoo oneSearch or making sure that Taptu, abphone, Medio, JumpTap, FAST or find.mobi have you on the index.

I speak to CEO’s of mobile search companies and talk about their theories of mobile seo, what their search engines look for and then use these ideas in implementations.

Usually most of my mobile seo implementations have been run with mobile advertising campaigns and I have to say the marriage of both of these bear’s fruit. For the porn and mobile marketing industry I am working on my own special “alt tag” use to optimise certain images for visual mobile search companies and services.

On top of that, I prefer to use the term tags rather than keywords in mobile as I find that mobile search engines are slightly different – especially with vertical mobile search services.

At the moment, I am learning with every optimisation. Text mobile sites are very different than image (video or porn sites) and indexing is a lot more complex.

Mobile search engines tend to be based on traffic and “popularity” which means that getting traffic and social media is essential for mobile seo success.

Thanks everyone for your support.

Mo'Jiva Mobile Advertising Campaign Set-up

After it only took me 3 minutes to set up a campaign as a publisher with mKhoj; I saw a press release from new mobile advertising agency Mo'Jiva. Then I decided to see how long it would take me set up a campaign as an advertiser with the Mo'Jiva.

I logged into Mo'Jiva.com then I chose advertiser. The platform is very clean and if you have set up a mobile advertising campaign before, it is no problem to navigate.

The navigation was simple and I chose not to do anything tricky and stick to the pre-set options to see how long it would take me to set up. I used the gomo.zinadoo.mobi URL (huge article on the uptake of this URL on its way).

But there were a couple of innovative or strange depending on how you look at it features.

For example, as you set up the campaign you have to choose your own countries and operators. There is not a list but you add countries into a search box and then you accept them. If you have no idea of your target market and or are trying to get visibility in Spain this might be a bit cumbersome.

Mo'Jiva was boasting about geo-location advertising - is this it? I added USA, UK and Germany.

But placing bids was extremely simple and by the time I got to this stage - just before payment - only 6 minutes had passed. To be honest, I didn't notic the Pay per View tab in this screen shot as I was setting up. I will go back and check it out.

I found the schedule for setting up ads a bit lengthy. It is not something I personally would have the time to do. But if I am optimising a site or running a campaign for someone in the US from Europe - I imagine that this would be a vital tool.

So all in all, Mo'Jiva seems to have passed the ease of use test. Now I did use the Place Schedule to set up a 2 week campaign and I did buy USD 25 of credit. Results and effectiveness of the campaign on the way!

mKhoj mobile advertising campaign

So I have just set up an ad campaign as a publisher with mKhoj and it took me 3 minutes. I jest you not.

Actually, I am not sure if this is great as it was so easy, I didn't really have the opportunity to personalise or target my advertising needs. I suppose its a double sided coin. On the one side, easy is essential. On the other side when you get more experienced with campaigns you want more choice. (EG. part approve some ads, before others etc).

But, this was very easy and fast.

The top screen shot shows the one page ad campaign set-up. You add the site name ad then the URL and select the criteria for the site (news, portals etc).

Then you choose the ad category and if its adult.

After that you see this (image below) where you select the type, the way you approve, filter the keywords (which is interesting use of competitive filtering) and add your keywords.

That is it! It took me 3 minutes in total. I will be running a new campaign more results to follow - there is a pre-installed analytics tool as well.

David Harper CEO Winksite on Responsible Formatting of Mobile Sites

Yikes. I am not alone. David Harper from Winksite (another mobile web site maker that I am about to test) and I spoke on the phone.

He made me aware of this: http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/

Apparently my issues of the formatting redirection to mobile site thingy is common knowledge and well know. There is even a manifesto on it. These issues of transcoding and redirection seem to be a huge problem.

I mean I know this as we all wrote about Vodafone/ Novarra etc. But now I have experienced it first hand I am gutted. Thank-god that there are people actively trying to sort this out and I am not a developer but will be implementing some of things that Rich and David suggest to change the gomonews.mobi site.

Thanks David

CTO Wapple Rich Holdsworth on the Mobile Frames bad for Mobile Browser issue

Yikes the phone has been ringing non-stop; lots of people have a frames for mobile browsers story to share. But most importantly Rich Holdsworth the CTO of Wapple got back to me immediately with regards to the frames issue and problems I am having with the frames on the site.

1. Good News: I am not going mad. I don’t have frames on my site and Wapple (according to Rich) would NEVER push frames on mobile.
2. Bad news: Go Daddy the company I purchased the mobi site from is to blame.
3. More Bad News:  I chose Go Daddy because the company claims to be mobile friendly and is part of the W3C.
4. Even More Bad News: Go Daddy is adding the frames to my site and making my mobile site unreadable.
5. Conclusion: Go Daddy BAD.

So what do I do?

Basically, I have lots of instructions from Wapple on how to solve this problem. I need to give an IP address to GoDaddy and then the issue can be sorted out.

I know GoDaddy is cheap – but this is terrible that they are taking my site re-hosting it on GoDaddy adding frames and then pushing the content. BAD. BAD. BAD.

What we think?
Thanks Wapple for getting back so quickly. But no thanks to Go Daddy for messing up with my mobi site. I am thinking of a getting another site m.gomonews.com to see if that solves the redirection issue to the mobile site - from a new provider.

Mobile Web browsers don't like frames - but what can we do about it?

I am all confused. I am very good at making mobile sites. At least, I thought I was. Today I get an email from Ronan Cremin from Find.mobi.  I have asked him for some help improving GoMo News for SEO purposes on find.mobi and also adding (yes, I am asking for favours) some porn sites that I am currently doing the SEO for to be indexed.  He has been extremely helpful and today he told me about the issues or problems with gomonews.mobi and the projects I have.

There are some issues with the porn sites that are video based and that they are just too big to render for mobile.  But at least he tried – I did suggest to the company that they remove the number of videos available on the home page – but they said this is their bread and butter – so didn’t.

This is one of those hiccups with Mobile SEO as you know what to do – but if the company doesn’t want to change – you are a bit stuck.

But, my issues are related to GoMo News.

Apparently, I have frames on Gomonews.mobi.  Ronan says that frames are a huge no no and mobile browsers hate them. GoMo News will only work on S60 devices or the iPhone. But, these frames -

1. How did they get there?
2. Who put them there?
3. How do I get rid of them when I can’t find them?

I made the site from scratch with Wapple. It’s not brilliant but it’s not awful (I just need to spend some quality time on it) –but as hard as I try I can’t find any frames. Then I do a search on the Wapple portal for code that looks like a frame and I can’t see it either? I have opened up a help ticket with Wapple to see if they can solve the problem. But I can’t fix what I simply can’t see – and something that I can’t actually remember including.

Hmmm. But if frames are that bad for mobile sites – should they even be offered to consumers.
Yikes all these questions.  I am not going to try and find some answers.

Mobile Marketing Forum Mobile SEO a reality

The Mobile Internet is disjointed. All of these mobile sites from WAP. or m. or .mobile or mobi is creating a piecemeal ecosystem.

Everyone is confused as to what is the best for mobile Internet sites and which optimisation services work.

For the first time though, people have actually started asking the question - which is the best way to optimise - rather than which is the fastest way to get mobile. Recently I heard some stats that 45% of top brands had gone mobile.

Yikes. The majority of these "gone mobile deployments" were done with crass transcoding techniques. Transcoding does very little for Mobile SEO.

I spoke to a couple of brands at Mobile Marketing Forum about this. I don't claim to have all the answers but I think the use of WAP. sites needs to be phased out. WAP is an unhealthy old term that means very little. There needs to be common standards not just form dotmobi -but from the search engines stating which sites they favour.

How does mobile search engine Taptu play the Mobile SEO game?

During my conversation with Taptu’s SVP Bob Last (see www.gomonews.com) I touched on the subject of Mobile SEO.

I wanted to know if there was an “add your site” service to Taptu and what SEO measures (if any) were in place.

Bob said that Taptu was primarily a social assisted search. Issues of page rank and links were pointless.

Moreover, you can’t play the traditional SEO game with Taptu. It works on the basis of traffic, popularity and discussion. The site that gets the most hits gets to the top of Taptu and that is it.

Taptu prides itself on being a pure mobile centric search engine. The real estate is primarily mobile. Taptu indexes what is hot and that is how it works in the social media paradigm. What is hot is determined by votes, click through etc.

Taptu is about discussion and that forms the basis of the SEO. Get traffic, get indexed.

This seems fair, but niche services might not get the visibility they need or as I have said in the past - the need of mobile advertising and buying traffic becomes more important on mobile.

Ready.mobi

I am getting addicted to ready.mobi. The way in which the site is analysed with results and a ranking system based on numbers is very good and very very easy to understand.

Here is an overview of a transcoding GoMo News site from Get Mobile. Http://gomonews.getmobile.com

The above shows the cost of getting the page and the speed. Below you can see what the exact site looks like on different mobile devices. 

If anyone does this and gets a 5 for a NON dotmobi site - please let me know.