Mobile SEO

Is linking as important in Mobile SEO as it is with online SEO?

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Adshandy Mobile Advertising

Adshandy offers mobile advertising solutions globally. It's a German company and has quite a strong local brand name.

I tested it yesterday as a publisher and I started to set up as an advertiser - but I didn't finish the set up.

The publisher set-up was simple and the videos really help. But before the screen shots -first the concerns. There was zero optimisation for mobile keywords or optimisation for the ads. The set up is incredibly simple but this was a pure mobile advertising solution.

Again, what I am finding regularly is that mobile advertising providers are failing to take advantage of easy to implement tools and services. I know, I am using and running mobile advertising daily - so I am in a different position to many - but advertisers are shooting themselves in the foot and Adshandy is no exemption.

I want to optimise campaigns for clients and not just to set up an account simply.

But, back to the solution - setting up with Adshandy is simple. The home page once details are given is clean and simple.

Germany is a lot more relaxed than other companies with adverts and adult adverts. But what I found is that there is little or no education. I wanted to know where the ads were coming from what type of adult content and what is the difference between non-erotic and erotic.  There needs to be more explanation and also some insight in to porn, erotic, nudity, risque.

I think it was MKhoj that also used blacklisted URL's which is just a bore. Keywords would be optimal here.

I also found the ad placement offer from Adshandy strange. With this service already clicked users don't have much choice on to which ads are placed or the CPM. 

My problem is that its so easy - its a bit too easy. There was a lot of help (videos and FAQ) but they don't really help. They look good - but little else.

I found the same with setting up as an advertiser - so to be fair - I will wait a while to go back and try again - incase there are some updates in the pipeline.

Maybe I am judging harshly -but I am looking at everything now as a way of getting a better ROI or the best CTR for clients. 

Mobile Advertising and SEO setting up as a publisher on BuzzCity

I found the set up as a publisher for Buzzcity Mobile advertising services interesting but not very structured.

Signing up as a publisher is like being a child in a sweet shop. There are several options, packs, pre-made tools and services that users can choose from. This makes it fun and you click around a lot, but it also makes it messy.

Although, after only a few hours of playing around on BuzzCity - I can see why traffic to the mobile social network is huge. All publishers get a free mobile page, instantly. On top of that there is an online ethic of "linking". Be it widgets, your blog name or your mobile site - users are encouraged to add links and create pages and get widgets - for the promise of an no brainer revenue share.

To set up as a publisher I used the new Mobile SEO winksite (www.winksite.com/benar/mobileseo)

So part one of the set up was simple, you log in to www.buzzcity.com and click publisher.

I didn't like this section as you had to decide if you wanted to serve display or text ads and classify the site very early on - without knowing the rest of the options available.

But what I did like in the next screen shot is the very clear "Default Ads". What this is, is that the default ads will go to the "myGamma Exchange" which will increase traffic to your site. So after I set my adverts to general and saved this - I went to find out what the Gamma Exchange was.

I didn't have to look to hard as the next section automatically leads you to the Exchange services. These are simply WAP pages automatically created for you to be put on myGamma for traffic driving and link building.

One is generic and one is personalised.

      

I quickly set the tabs to what was interesting to me and then I created a GoMo News & Strategy link to the site. I was advised to drive more traffic to my site by adding a reciprocal link from the Winksite back to this site - which I did very quickly.

I also added BuzzCity as a publisher with my new ID on the Winksite mobile site as well and shortly I expect to see some ads. I have already received several to approve.

But what is very apparent is the push on linking and link exchange from BuzzCity. I question whether this is a real Mobile SEO strategy -but it seems as though BuzzCity is growing by offering this service as traffic generation is vital for advertisers. The more MyGamma pages and the more cross links on each page the more traffic.

With a little bit more structure this could be very good. But uptake or success in the mobile search engines might also have an impact on the quality of the mobile site. If the traffic is coming from a low end personal MyGamma page it might not win in the "weight" or "worthiness" part of mobile search.

There is also room for improvement on selecting mobile adverts. Its nice and easy but its not clean and fresh or personal.

I am not going to make any strong judgments on this until I have signed up as a publisher - that is next. 

Mobile Advertising & Mobile SEO Workshop

This workshop will teach you the basics of mobile advertising. It will teach you the terminology surrounding mobile advertising and give you the ability to initiate a mobile advertising campaign.

The workshop is ideal for anyone involved in mobile advertising or marketing. The class will be interactive and ensure that any participants get the depth of understanding necessary to either discuss, master or undertake mobile advertising campaigns.

Lesson Plan
Introduction to Mobile Advertising (30 minutes)
Questions Addressed: What is Mobile Advertising? Why is it important? Why is it different to traditional Advertising?

What is the difference between Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising and Mobile Marketing?

Comprehensive Assessment of Mobile Advertising (30 -45 minutes)
Questions Addressed: So we know what it is – but how do we do it?
This is the most vital lesson of the day. It will teach individuals the basics of mobile advertising. From what is mobile ad inventory or PPC, CPM, CPC etc. But most importantly we will focus on keywords essential for successfully running a mobile campaign. These included contextual advertising, search advertising, targeted advertising, personalisation, recommendation and SMS marketing.

Interactive lesson (1.5 hours)
Note: Each student will need a mobile phone and a laptop for the interactive lesson.
We will all create a mobile advertising campaign.
We can use a real mobile site and real networks and step by step optimise the campaign in the most efficient and effective way.

Before this – we will look at case studies of big brands such as JumpTap, Google and Decktrade or Yahoo! in order to try and learn as we work. This should ensure that by the end of the lesson everyone will be confident about mobile advertising, mobile advertising terminology and the way in which mobile advertising functions.
Working Break or Working Lunch

Mobile SEO Workshop (1.5 – 2 hours)
This section is about the Mobile Internet. It will empower users to create and optimise mobile sites simply, easily and quickly.

Questions Answered 30 minutes
What is the Mobile Internet? Why is it different to online? What is a mobi site and which mobile search engines are there?

Why is the mobile Internet different and what are quick and easy ways to optimise it? Who are the players and what is the difference between a transcoded site to a mobi site?

Participation Workshop
This participation workshop will demonstrate specific ways to create mobile websites and then optimise them. It will ensure that anyone is confident in creating several mobile sites effectively indexing them and getting them onto Mobile Search engines.

We will address mobile keywords, meta tags and optimisation techniques, alt tags and the differences between mobile web sites at the moment.

Who Should Attend?
Anyone interested in Mobile Advertising from brands, professionals, start-ups, communication companies and PR agencies interested in social media optimisation.

If you are only interested in Mobile SEO we recommend you come to our unique Mobile SEO seminar - where we show you how top optimise sites, index, insert meta-tags etc.

Where will this take place?
June 17th London Victoria

How much will it cost?
Half Day Mobile SEO only GBP 295
Full Day GBP 595

Why Us?
We have been involved in Mobile Search and Advertising since 2004. We have run and managed several mobile advertising campaigns and consulted to mobile search companies or Web sites looking for a Mobile SEO solution.
We believe in learning via doing. Our workshops are interactive and based on structured lesson plans and real examples.

Mo'Jiva Mobile Advertising Spend update

Well, so far its not bad on the Mo'Jiva new advertising network.

After a week - on one campaign (with zero personalisation) I have managed a 0.03% click through rate.

The number of impressions has amazed me 904903 (that was more than AdMob - in the three trials I did with AdMob last year). So I have only spent about USD 6 and over the weekend I am going to go in an re-tweek the adverts by setting times for pushing and channels.

Will draw some conclusions at the end.

Setting Up a Medio MobileNow Mobile Advertising Campaign

I have been a huge fan of Medio Mobile Search for a long time. I love the work on T-Zones and also the T-Mobile ODP in the US is great.

So, I feel guilty not having the same thing to say about the Mobile Advertising part of the business. OK. Medio is playing catch-up in mobile advertising; but I feel the problem with MobileNow is the actually user interface of the set up page.

I took a look at this in December and decided to wait a while to allow for some changes and improvements -but very little has occured.

Well - hold on. That is not fair, there are a couple of good points.

Setting up as a publisher is quick, simple and very easy. It took only two minutes to set up as a publisher -but Medio seems to have a strick policy on which sites it accepts. Out of 3 only one of mine was accepted.

But when you set up an advertising campaign the interface is simply terrible. There is no help and you will have to be a professional to set the right payment terms for your campaign. I don't know any nice way to put this but the + that you have to click to open up the mobile advertising campaign has to go.

On top of that guidelines, help and more information can help the set up from the early stages. With a little bit of guidance (average cost, average ppc etc) users would have a better understanding of how to manage the campaign. This would drive the uptake of this as well. Looking at my Wapple site which serves Medio ads there is still an inventory issue as only 65% - 80% ads are served. OK, I know I haven't made it easy as I have set up the publishing site for two Medio adverts on the home page - so that might be an issue. Decktrade also seems to have the same issue and only the AdMob advert gets a constant 100% fill rate.

This is my least favourite page in the setting up (below). Compared with modern mobile advertising campaigns I would recommend that Medio complete eradicate this UI and start again. Also - a lot of the features and services are already ticked as "yes" which is annoying.

But it should be the service and the CTR not the UI that is important so I am about to run a USD 50 campaign and will report back.

 

Workshop: Mobile Advertising & Mobile SEO

I have had several calls recently about our workshops. The one most requested is on Mobile SEO and Mobile Advertising. So I thought I might find out about anyone interested in attending a class on How to effectively implement a mobile advertising campaign?  This will be followed by a tutorial on Mobile Meta tags, mobile site efficiency and three simple steps for immediate Mobile SEO.

I am planning two half day classes (one after the other) in London in June. Anyone interested please email me (benagomo@gmail.com)

Mobile SEO and Mobile Advertising with Winksite

Winksite is a mobile Internet site online creator. In a number of minutes, users can create, optimise add advertising to and launch their own mobile site space.

At first, I thought Winksite was nothing new. Mobisitegalore, Zinadoo, Wapple all offer this service and I have successfully managed and created mobile sites with all of them.

When, I accessed Winksite I expected a similar interface to the other site makers. I didn't get it. What I got was a rich mobile site creation tool that made me create not one but two mobile site in a matter of minutes.

They can be found here: http://winksite.mobi/benar/gomo and http://winksite.mobi/benar/mobileseo

For the first site (gomo) I just used standard Winksite features. I changed the background and added a picture to the Mobile SEO site. This occurred with great ease and simplicity.

Then I found some features; which surprised me. There was a Mobile SEO button AND a Mobile Advertising button. I immediately thought, this must be how Winksite makes its money. By either pimping the mobile sites with its own adverts and generating revenue.

But I was wrong. To my surprise there was a note saying, "100% your revenue". Well, I nearly fell off my chair. This is the first example I have seen of this from from a free mobile site creator be it www.getmobile.com or www.zinadoo.com

So I checked it out.  The screen grab below shows how easy it is. You can CHOOSE self-service from Winkiste or add your ID for several mobile advertisers. This was the most impressive choice of global mobile advertising companies that I had seen in one place. Buzz City was already on there - which I thought was great for the company as it is fighting very hard to become a leader not a newbie in the US market.

Then the actual interface for mobile advert placement is even simpler. I am about to set this up with mkhoj, admob etc. But first I am going to get a Buzzcity account as I have been eager to test these services outside of the mygamma marketplace. The examples of the ID from each provider is a must. This simplifies life for the heavy mobile campaign users.

On several occasions when I implement three different campaigns on the same day - I always spend ages double checking the ad-codes for the companies. Seeing what the code should look like makes a huge difference and makes sure that silly mistakes aren't made.  (More from this and screen shots when all the adverts are in place).

The advertising looked good - so then I decided to look for some Mobile SEO tools. This was slightly harder to find, but is available in the Edit page section. I was eager to see how Winksite managed SEO services. I realised that mobile site map creation was automatic - which is great. The use interface is also a no brainer. See below:

What we think?

I have to say, I am impressed. I will be using this a lot more often and the more advertisers included the better. Stay tuned as I will be purchasing a new dotmobi domain to transfer this one to and lets see if there are any transcoding problems or issues this time and I will also follow up on the successful integration and revenue generation from the mobile advertising campaigns.

Ready.mobi score for gomonews.mobi increases after mobile seo

So, I started to optimise gomonews.mobi after comments from find.mobi and Wapple. The results have started to kick in after 24 hours.

I did some major changes yesterday and today my ready.mobi score has increase to 4. I haven't added a mobile sitemap haven't finished tweaking the site yet.

Mobile Seo News RSS

New RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MobileSeo

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.