It seems like not too long ago that web designers were talking about the scroll-down factor for web pages. The short of it being that people are much less likely to scroll to read to the end of the page, so web design began to incorporated much more succinct methods and scrolling became less of an issue. It was about keeping your audience interested and engaged. Good marketing does this everywhere, from the grocery store (who wants to have to compare prices on cans of tuna over three aisles? And, yes, I once encountered a grocery store that did that!) to the organization of books in your local bookstore to our online marketing. The quicker and easier it is to browse for your item and find what you want, the more likely your customer will stay and purchase/use your services. When was the last time that you, as a consumer, walked into a store that was crowded and decided to dig for the one small item you wanted. I know that I turn and walk out immediately. The same is true online.

Although most of us now take what I have come to think of as the scroll factor seriously on regular websites, the opening of the mobility market has us thinking in even smaller chunks, just because the real estate on mobile device screens is tiny. To make mobile online activity more accessible and less crowded some rethinking must be involved. As Doug Caverly explains in his article “Google’s Short Answers Move to Mobile Phones”, Google has “taken an important step, then, by making the short answers it introduced a month ago available to folks who are on the go.” Rather than explaining how this will help mobility users, take a quick look at a visual comparison of search results on a regular search versus the short answers version:

Google’s shorter descriptions for each link provides the mobile user with better selection and a less crowded experience, which makes it a much more enjoyable experience. Sometimes to get the attention of our users or customers, we have to think like they do and anticipate their needs and desires. Google seems to be pretty good at doing just that. When building your own mobile website and implementing your online marketing strategy, thinking outside of the old paradigms may be the key to increasing your own market share.

It’s tempting to think of mobility devices as just smaller versions of your desktop or laptop computers. You can access your email and the internet from them, so wouldn’t the SEO rules remain the same for mobility devices? This is definitely not the case, and there are a plethora of articles and advice out there on how to focus your SEO efforts specifically for mobility. Cindy Krum has written an article, “New Mobile SEO: What You Need to Know”, that gives some great tips.

Krum points out that at this point in time, mobile search engines place a heavy weight on bounce rate and she advises that “The best thing you can do to improve your mobile SEO is to ensure that the mobile crawlers and user agents determine that your content will render well and load quickly on any mobile phone.”

Basic Site Architecture – Basic SEO practices when it comes to site architecture will not steer you wrong in mobility either. Make sure your tagging is done correctly for your site, then create another style sheet for mobile devices, and call it handheld.css. “This will allow you to format your existing pages for viewing on a mobile phone without having to create separate mobile content.” Use this style sheet to block things from being rendered by using a display:none attribute to the style sheet.

iPhones are a bit of a different matter, although they can see traditional web pages, mobile pages are preferred by many iPhone users, so making another style sheet named iPhone.css covers that issue too. Be sure to include a mobile site map and link it in your robots.txt file.

Advanced Site Architecture – Sometimes your regular site will not be suitable for mobile browsing, including “Sites [that] don’t use external style sheets, have a large file size, sloppy code or lots of multi-media content that could have trouble rendering on mobile phones”. For some of these sites, the best option is to create mobile specific content on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory. If this is the case, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Move top navigation to the bottom of the page
- Jump links at the top of the page can be handy to have, especially for contact information
- Minimize the scrolling for handheld devices
- Work on linking your mobile site and your main, traditional site to each other

Mobile Platforms and Software – “Most mobile platforms simply take the existing content on your traditional page and remove all complex code and media, leaving simply text and a minimal amount of images.” Although taking this step seems like it would save time and energy, there are a couple problems you should note.
- Your content could be included as a subdomain of the platform’s name, rather than as a part of your own domain
- Often the file names these programs create are not optimized, so all of the SEO value from your site architecture and links may be lost

As you delve into the world of mobile SEO, remember that mobility does bring new challenges and is growing and changing rapidly, so keeping on top of the newest developments is key.

I was reading an article this morning about iPhone apps. This particular article, entitled “PayPal iPhone App Hits One Million Downloads”, was basically about the popularity of the PayPal app on the iPhone and how “One million downloads shows just how ready people are to live a cashless and card-free culture with their wallet living safely in the cloud.” I find that idea compelling as a consumer, but even more compelling as a business person.

But, just like the blog post on Pizza Hut embracing Twitter this is another story about using new technology to promote your business. Someone recently told me that there is a little iPhone app that allows the comic of the day from your favourite web comics to be viewed on your iPhone. Handy! Seems like pure fun too, doesn’t it. But if you get the comic regularly on your mobile device and don’t have to go searching for it or remember to go online each day to read it, then you are never behind. And that is a step that will build a loyal fan base, for those who do web comics. The free comics don’t make you money in and of themselves, but fans buy the printed collections, t-shirts, and memorabilia. They also attend conventions and pay to see their favourite artists. Providing an easier way for your fans to keep up with your work is a stroke of marketing brilliance.

So, with the popularity of iPhone, it may be in your company’s best interest to develop a little application for it to open another channel for your customers to connect with you. A book store could have a list of the latest releases or authors reading at their stores. Grocery stores can send ads, perhaps in an app that allows you to customize your top 20 items bought in a week. A freelance service business could even post tips related to their business interests. The list is endless and depends on the business you are running and what will interest your customers the most. Think of this as an opportunity to talk to them and entice them with the best of your products and services.

Rather than thinking about new technology as simple tools, remember that these apps can become personal touches. Over the past few decades, marketing was about reaching the most people at once: billboards, television commercials and print advertisements were all about mass marketing. With mobile device apps, avenues like Twitter and Facebook, blogging, and business websites, we have the ability to reach out in a much more personal way, which is a phenomenal opportunity to grow your business and develop brand loyalty among your customers.

Is Apple headed for a showdown with Google? According to Ben Parr of Mashable, a heavyweight battle on the mobile advertising front is well underway.

While both Apple and Google, with the iPhone and Android respectively will succeed at building their own mobile advertising platforms, the key to success will be relationships with additional platforms, like BlackBerry.

Sometimes when I read about a new software package or a new electronic device, I think “would I use that” and other times it is “how would I use that”. Today I admit I am just wondering how far social networking will end up taking us. I get Twitter and Facebook and am regularly excited about new social networking possibilities, both socially and professionally. But today I read an article about Apple filing a patent for a system that would allow people in close proximity to “discover each other” via social networking. Which is a compelling thought on one hand, but leaves me envisioning handshakes abandoned and people gathered in a room together chatting on their iPhones and iPads. It’s extreme, I admit, and unlikely to ever come to be quite like that, but it did give me an interesting visual and sometimes I wonder if anyone else has these ideas too.

The article that caused me to ponder how far social networking will go, entitled “Apple files mobile social networking patent request”, gives a few details about the prospective patent. The title of the patent requested is “Group Formation Using Anonymous Broadcast Information” and it gives a description of a system of token exchanges that allows mobile devices that are within a certain range to discover each other and form a group. Apple suggests that these groups could facilitate “at events like concerts, conferences, meetings, rallies and weddings.”

A more complete explanation of Apple’s intent with this patent is that “User interfaces, filters and search engines can be provided to the users to enable users to search and manage groups. The groups can be used with various applications—e.g., calendars, address books, e-mail, instant messaging — to provide additional content and services to the users. If the geographic location of the group at the contact time is known, then members of the group can be targeted to receive location-based services (LBS) and content.”

While my first reaction is an image of extreme isolation in a crowd, as I think about shopping situations, I can see some extremely beneficial uses to a location-based group. Say, like me, you are an avid reader. At some point, you’ll walk into a new bookstore. If you are the owner of the bookstore and know about mobile groups, you can have a group set up for your store, which lists the sales of the week, future book signings and appearances, and even potentially a catalogue of your inventory. As a customer, I can walk into this new store, join the group, and then have a variety of information at my fingertips. It’s a win-win situation for both people in that group: the bookstore sells books by providing me with easy information.

Certainly, using these tools for the benefit of your business will take some thinking and creativity, but if Apple and other social networking sites are finding a market for them, surely we can put them to good use in the business world too.

We’re a household that loves gadgets. I work in SEO and my husband is a programmer. Gadgets are the backbone of our lives. Our kids were barely upright when they began trying to poke at our computers and bang on the laptop keys. So you can imagine that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been a hot topic in our world.

Chris Crum gives a nice overview of the gadgets of the year in his article “A Glimpse of this Year’s Upcoming Gadgets”. From new products in televisions and blue-ray players to touch notebooks and e-readers, there really is something to appeal to everyone at CES. I know a number of non-technical people who will be excited about the developments in television related products, while the more technically oriented are drooling over the latest and greatest computer gadgets. It’s a wide range.

As an SEO aficionado, there were a few releases that caught my eye on Chris Crum’s list:

- Microsoft and HP combining their efforts and providing Bing as the default search engine with MSN as the default homepage for HP PCs in 42 countries.
- Intel’s new family of processors.
- Palm’s updates to their webOS platform.
- Yahoo’s announcements of their new hardware partnerships.
- The availability of professional service options for the Cisco Eos social entertainment platform.
- A new browser release for Opera.
- RIM’s newest BlackBerry achievement: a presenter that can show PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, etc straight from a BlackBerry device.
- Ford’s Internet-ready vehicles.

Some of these announcements are changes in the way computers work. Updated webOs platforms, new processors, and bigger and better BlackBerries can change how much we do online, how fast the experience can be, and the flexibility of our computers, regardless of their size. SEO takes interest in these developments so we can try to predict the next big changes in the way we use the Internet and how businesses access the Internet.

Other announcements, like Internet-ready vehicles, provide opportunities to expand our Internet usage and provide growth in markets like the developing mobile website marketplace. And still others have the potential to shift search engine market share, like the deal between Microsoft and HP that will expand Bing’s exposure, or swing social networking to a newer forum; both of which can have a big impact on SEO strategies.

Of course, while all of these new gadgets and releases are fun to look at and speculate about, only time will tell what will take hold of the marketplace and what will fizzle out. Right now, we’re all just looking and making notes to keep an eye on some of these developments

Don’t let mobile websites be your business’ telephone banking blind spot.

The other day, I was thinking about how slow I was to adopt online banking. It took nothing for me to go to telephone banking, but my mindset was stuck there for years. I knew about online banking, but my mentality was very much “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. I liked telephone banking and it did everything I wanted it to do, so why bother? Then I switched over to online banking and I realizedI had a telephone banking blind spot.

Sometimes the way we use technology is just like telephone banking. It seems like it will do all you want it to do, you’re comfortable with it, and there is no impetus for change. I get that, because I’ve been there. I’ve looked at a new development and thought “Cool, but my (insert whatever you want here) works just fine, so why make the switch?”

Except that in business it is never that easy. Technology is proving that it can make or break a business, especially in tight economic times. And technology can change the way we all interact with each other; Twitter and Facebook have changed how we keep in touch with our friends and they are now morphing into fabulous business tools. As entrepreneurs, we all have to take these lessons to heart. No need to be the last business on the block to take up the mantle of new technologies.

Mobile websites are just such an animal.

With the growth of mobile devices and a growing segment of the population using mobile devices to access the internet, mobile websites promise to grow too. Joshua Odmark wrote about this promise and explains some of the potential for business growth in his article “Top 10 Reasons Your Website Should Go Mobile”.

Here are the 10 reasons he states:

1. Google has a separate index for mobile content.
2. Your regular website is not going to cut it.
3. 1/5 of Americans access the mobile web each day.
4. Mobile web will overtake the desktop within 5 years.
5. $1.6 billion purchased from mobile devices in 2009.
6. 93% of U.S. adults own a cell phone.
7. 5% of the top 500 online retailers have a mobile website/iPhone app.
8. Mobile advertising spending will surpass $6.5 billion in 2012.
9. Users average 13 hours online per week, up from 7 in 2002.
10. There are an estimated 2 billion cell phones worldwide.

With this growing market at your fingertips, your business can adopt mobile website development, and it could even influence how the mobile web scene will grow over the next few years.

If you are a National company and you have logged into your Google Analytics account lately, you’ve noticed that there is a steady increase in visitors coming to your site using a local search modifier with a keyword term.

More and more often , users are typing in seo company Toronto rather than just seo company. Although Google renders results based on your IP location, tweaking the algorithm is an ongoing process and the general population doesn’t know or care about how the results are rendered. They just want local results.

The growth of mobile advertising only serves to increase the urgency for advertisers and advertising platforms to get creative in their approach to local search opportunities.  In an interview with MarketingMag.ca, Marc Tellier, CEO of Yellow Pages Income Fund agrees; “I think we’re going to see a trend in the Internet, broadly speaking, or digital media, to go more local.”

SEO companies have been preaching local search for a couple of years now but it has taken time to develop into  a category that can produce a significant return on investment. Looks like smartphones might be the vechicle to kick it into overdrive.

Yesterday I was talking about the effect smartphones were having on internet subscriptions and how companies like Fandango and Nationwide had developed mobile applications in order to simplyfy the lives of their current and potential customers .

Today, as I was checking in on the important people group on my Tweetdeck account, GetConnected announced that CanPages had introduced My Nearest;

My Nearest helps you locate various businesses near you (within 10km) such as banks/ATM’s, office shops , restaurants, malls, and much more. The app does work on the iPod Touch via WiFi but it uses the iPhone GPS to find locations near you.

The huge benefit of this app is you are getting information results from the national Canpages database which has more than 1 million business listings and growing. Needless to say, this app knows what it’s doing.

The only issue I can see with this free download is CanPages database of businesses. Other YP companies have tried voice powered search apps to locate businesses that are “near” you, however, they only provided businesses that were paying for advertising.

Still, let’s give CanPages credit for forward thinking and providing a free app to help consumers and build their brand.

I have never been a serious cell phone enthusiast but I am beginning to love smart phones.

On a recent trip to drop my daughter off at the University of Texas, I was able to scout out the beautiful city of Austin with my IPhone Maps application. Not only could I get directions from one address to another, I could see how long it would take me to walk, drive or bus it. The app even showed me the number of the bus I needed to take!

Smartphones provide an amazing user experience whether you are using  IPhone apps, Blackberry Apps or any other web enabled device application.

It’s No Wonder that Gartner Expects Smartphones:

to account for 45.5% of all mobile phone sales in 2013, up from just over 9% in 2008. The embrace of smartphones — especially the iPhone — coupled with a rise in flat-rate data plan pricing, signals that a fundamental change is underway in how consumers interact with high-end devices.

Smartphones are expected to drive mobile internet subscription growth to 134.3 million in the US by 2013 according to eMarketer.

The adoption of Smartphones is forcing web publishers to provide a better user experience by developing user friendly websites for consumers and in turn,  better user experience is driving more consumers to purchase smartphones.

Businesses Need to Develop Mobile Advertising Strategies

eMarketer predicts that mobile advertising in the US will hit $1.56 billion by 2013.

Is Your Website Ready for the Mobile Internet?

Building Applications

Fandango is an online service that allows consumers to purchase movie tickets  in advance. They realized that many movie goers prefer to purchase tickets closer to show time and when they don’t have access to their PCs.  They developed their own application for the IPhone so consumers could purchase tickets whenever and wherever they are. The app has been downloaded 2.5 million times since its inception in March 2009.

Here are a few tips regarding building an application for mobile enabled devices from Ted Hong from Fandango as told to  WebProNews

• Have a clear purpose for developing the app
• Be prepared to support it properly
• Make sure measuring capability in place
• Build awareness of the app

Nationwide Insurance developed their own app that can :

• GPS locate you in case of an accident
• Call 911
• Submit a claim form, including photos
• Direct you to the appropriate auto shop

and it is not exclusive to Nationwide, it will email your claim to your own insurance company!

Portable Websites

The growing popularity of web enabled devices; smartphones, GPS systems, cameras and mp3 players is forcing  companies to develop portable websites that are “device independant”.   Cindy Krum of RankMobile  makes the point that mobile algorithms will get smarter at recognizing the device that you are searching from and personalize the results.

Web designers will have to anticipate  a broader range of devices, with each device carrying a specific demographic.

Our Take on Mobile Search

We are still a year or two away from driving serious traffic to your website through web enabled devices. The issue as always is that when traffic does start to come, you ‘d better be ready or you will be left behind. Turning your current website into a mobile friendly site is not an difficult task.