The Promise of Mobile Websites
Survey after survey has shown a rising trend of mobile phones being purchased by consumers all over the world. But what most business owners don’t realise is that the latest generation of mobile phones come with mobile phone internet and web browsing features to rival traditional computers. More and more people are using their mobile phones to search and find products and services. The freedom of not being tethered to a desk makes mobile smart phones a device of choice. Just look at the popularity of the iPhone.
Mobile website technology has been around for a few years but it is only recent years that dedicated mobile sites have begun to take off. The reason… Goolge search.
Google has recognised the coming importance of mobile websites and has a dedicated mobile site crawler called the “Googlebot-Mobile” that crawls your mobile site and checks if the site is viewable on a mobile device. Web pages that Google assesses as not viewable on a mobile phone, won’t be included in the Google mobile site index.
So this is the promise of mobile websites, the ability to get them indexed on Google mobile and for the mobile site to be found by consumers searching from their mobile phones. But is mobile search traffic worth attracting by paying for a mobile website to be developed? The answer in most cases is yes.
If you use the Google Adwords keyword tool, you can select the mobile search filter to see how many searchs per month are from mobile phones. Here is an example. For the keyphrase “cheap used cars” there are 110 mobile searches per month in Australia.
Google’s blog provides tips on how enhance the chances of your mobile site getting indexed. Here’s the link: Getting Google to Index Your Mobile Site.
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