There are many things that every experienced advertising or marketing professional knows. Somewhere on the list are the following facts; mobile platforms are taking over quickly and successfully, and Google knows the course to success when it comes to advertising. Recently these two facts have come together in a post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog. Google has released an official list of what they believe are the best ways to go about building websites optimized for smartphones.
The webmasters at Google write on their blog that things have changed since the last time they released information about smartphone optimization, and that Google has been improving upon their support for optimized content. Googlebot-Mobile was released for smartphones in December of 2011, in an effort to increase their mobile optimization support and to identify content that is smartphone optimized. Now, they are extending their efforts even further in releasing some recommendations for mobile optimization.
In the post, Google gives recommendations on successful mobile optimization, responsive web design, and use of device-specific HTML. They list the advantages of responsive web design, saying, “It keeps your desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to and for Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content.” Also, in the case of responsive design for optimal Googlebot response, Google writes, “Google can discover your content more efficiently as we wouldn’t need to crawl a page with the different Googlebot user agents to retrieve and index all the content.”
Google continues on to write how, if responsive web design is not an option in certain situations, using device-specific HTML can be almost just as successful. With their HTML suggestions, they map out the ways that advertisers can use Googlebot-Mobile’s technology to create successful HTML design. There are many more suggestions from Google on their recommendations page.
However, there is another company that feels that helping advertisers out with their optimizations for mobile is very important. An online web marketing company called Oracle Digital has released similar information to that in Google’s blog post. The difference is, Oracle actually provides a service of mobile SEO, so therefore retaining some information for themselves. They write, “If you’re a restaurant, for instance, you need to consider the benefits of mobile SEO. Your target audience is driving around town trying to decide where to eat. They will probably check their phone for local restaurants and reviews. An SEO company who knows local SEO and mobile SEO can be your very best mate.”
By now, everyone knows that mobile optimization and mobile SEO are important, but there are many who don’t understand the level of that importance. “Every day more and more smartphones get activated and more websites are producing smartphone-optimized content.” Google understands the importance and wants to help advertisers understand it as well, and then take action towards taking advantage of it. Both Google and Oracle Digital have a common goal of keeping the advertising world up to speed with new technology, and effective advertising options.
