Mobile domains, ranking in the mobile SERPs

Another day, another lesson learned. With reference to my work on mobile domains, I have been researching mobile search and ranking within search engines mobile web results. In particular Google mobile. (http://www.google.com/m) The difference between PC based web and mobile web is quite dramatic getting your mobile domains to rank well requires a change of SEO strategy and a bit of leg work.

The process of getting your domains to rank within the mobile web results, such as http://www.google.com/m (perform a search then click on “MOBILE”) requires the submission of a new XML sitemap to the search engines, browsing which should ideally be available to the public, rather than limited to a specific network operator, and changes within the HTML for the search engines to recognise the mobile version of your site and rank it accordingly. At the moment this only scratches the surface.

The integration of the mobile site version, enabling it to work in line with your main website requires some complex development work and is not for the faint hearted! Within the industry at the moment there is a difference of opinion toward whether a mobile site should be hosted as a subdomain or on a completely different domain altogether. You can use various methods such as subdomain.anysite.com, anysite.mobi and m.anyrsite.com, but these are all down to preference and your own SEO strategy. I like the subdomain method using the keywords of what you want your mobile site to rank for as the subdomain name itself, as opposed to using the standard m. prefix

We all know that mobile domains and mobile seo are very new concepts in comparison to the internet as a whole and as far as marketing potential goes are only in the foetal stages. I must say that the next 2-5 for mobile internet will be very interesting indeed.

I would appreciate any comments you may have from a mobile development point of view, things which have worked and things that haven’t.

Thanks

Gary

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