This is the first in a series of guest articles from Australia’s top mobilists.  Our industry is teeming with talented people with knowledge and skills to impart and over the next few months I will be asking some of them to share their views on their topic of expertise.

The first article is from Jonny Schneider, a Melbourne based mobile-web Producer, currently working on Yellow Mobile.  In this article Jonny talks about the differences between Online and Mobile SEO and the importance of developing a differentiated strategy to ensure that finding your mobile site is easier than finding a needle in a haystack!

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So why do I need Mobile SEO?

It’s easy to throw the term SEO around, and now that mobile web has arrived, there’re a lot of people asking what Mobile SEO is all about. A good place to start is to get right back to basics, what is SEO? Don’t dig too deep, just think about the acronym ‘SEO’ for a moment - it stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It deals with optimising your content to increase its find-ability through search engines, which brings more exposure to your product. Okay, easy. So Mobile SEO is about optimising mobile content for mobile search engines.

If you already know what SEO is, stay with me, in this article, we’ll discuss Platform and Context; why it matters for mobile content; and how this might influence your SEO strategy.

We’ve already established that SEO is basically about making content play nice with search engines. If you’ve got simple, text-heavy content published for web and you’re targeting people searching for specific information through mainstream search engines, then it’s a pinch - you can employ one of the tried and tested optimisation techniques and watch your organic traffic gradually increase in response. If your mobile content has similar structure and is targeted in the same way, then some of those techniques can be modified for mobile and may yield some results.

However, mobile content doesn’t usually have many similarities with online content. That’s because the context is different. Mobile content might be more concerned with things like location and immediacy. I need something near me, right now. Or perhaps you’re after something specific to a particular device, like a ring tone, application or game. We’ve now got the complexity of non-standard content along with a new context to consider. Here’s an example: if your product is targeted at a geographic region, is it possible to optimise your site content to give a higher rank when someone does a search while physically occupying that geographic region?

Mobile as a Platform brings another layer of complexity.

Let’s start with coding standards for mobile web. Basically, there are none. This is not for lack of trying, it’s got more to do with the hundreds of handset manufacturers producing devices according to their own specifications all handling web browsing in their own unique way. This creates complexity, and means that mobile web content that is suitable for everyone is often restricted by the lowest common denominator.

Then we have the confusion created by mobile search engines and more specifically how they determine what’s ’mobile’ and what’s not. Let’s not go into detail on that now but you might want to read the full analysis in this article.

What if you have both online and mobile content? For example, a strong online presence supported by a cut-down mobile version. Or perhaps you have mobile ad campaigns using mobile landing pages that advertise an online brand. How can you stop your mobile content from ‘competing’ with it’s online equivalent in search engines and how do you make sure mobile users don’t get the online content and vice versa? Next generation devices like Android and iPhone are making this even more difficult as the lines between mobile and online are blurred further.

By now you can see there are as many similarities as there are differences when talking about mobile and online content. No doubt, your content is also different to your competitor’s. These factors combine to suggest that SEO can’t be store bought - it has nuances and the best solutions are tailored to consider your content, your platforms and your target audiences.

If you’re just getting started though, here’re a few useful things to get you on your way:

MobiReady

MobiReady is an automated analysis tool designed to help you understand potential problems on your site that may hinder search engines from finding and classifying your content properly. It’s not focused specifically on SEO, but it does give an indication of the suitability of your site for mobile devices. Generally, the more mobile ready your site is, the easier it will be for a search engine to index.

MetaTXT Discoverability Standard

In simple terms, MetaTXT is a set of instructions used to help search engines to understand the relationship between an online and mobile site for SEO purposes. These instructions help search engine indexers find the mobile version of your site from the online version and vice versa by giving information such as the location of sitemaps, and target URLs for both online and mobile sites in a single file. It’s quite straight forward, and you can find everything you need to implement it at http://metatxt.org/.

Go Mobile SEO Tool

In April 2009 Visibility Mobile launched the first ever Mobile SEO tool in Go Mobile SEO. It’s aimed at the DIY audience and offers a range of optimisation tips and techniques based on automated analysis specific to your site. It’s a per-use service, and the toolkit is designed to get your site ready for the major mobile search engines.

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This article was written by Jonny Schneider as a guest on Mobilista.   You can read more from Jonny on his blog Rogerwilco and he’s also available for Mobile SEO consulting if you’d like to delve a little deeper into the area.