GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 11 - January 2010

MOBILESEO Theprojectedgrowth for mobile search ad revenuemeans that as affiliates we need to invest the timeandmoney necessary tobecomemobileWeb present and compliant. By Gary Beal I remember back in September of 2006when they first released the .mobi domain extension (referred to as a TLD or top level domain). I evenwent and bought dozens of themafterlisteningtotheindustryexperts rhapsodize about how big this was going tobe by 2008. Soherewe are in January 2010and it’s still lowonmost radars, and nonexistent on regular search results. Al- though mobile searches and multimedia search engines reported a triple growth year in2007, anddubbed2009 “the year ofmobile search,” I still haven’t seenany- thing of significance. Neither have my clients...even the bigones that youwould thinkwould seean influxof new traffic to their mobile web compliant version like Bingo.com.Afterall, thereare three types ofmobileusers: TheNeed-It-NowShopper –Whether pizza, ringtones or concert tick- ets, these users need it so bad they can’t possibly wait to get to a PC or they may not even have one. These types epitomize the 21st-century shopper. TheResearcher –Whether it’s for taxis, restaurants, post box- es, weather, stocks or the latest news, “researchers” look at their mobile phone more than they look at their own family. They use amobile likemost of ususe a normalPC: to feed their informa- tionhunger. TheKilling-TimeUser –Twit- ter, Facebook, online radios and music downloads, the hottest new topics, YouTube, television programs and other media are the strongest growth area inmo- bile phone usage. These types of users are on a train, at lunch or waiting for something tohappen. Figuring out where you stand among these user-types could be your key to being very success- ful in themobile world of online marketing. The fact is, the most recent figures cannot be ignored. According to the experts (in this case eMarketer.com), therewill be 844.9mil- lion worldwide mobile-search users in 2011, up from219.2million2006.Mobile search ad revenue was projected to grow to$2.4billion in2008, up from$6.8mil- lion in2006. On the reverse side of the argument an- other factor to consider is that with the releaseof iPhone,Gphone and200+oth- erWeb-ready phones that do not require anything other than a normal Web site, do you actually need amobile version of your site? My feeling is thatwith that kindof poten- tial revenue, or even half that, affiliates need to resource the limited time and money that it takes to become mobile Webpresent and compliant. MobileSearchOptimization? As there are ways to integrate various elements into your normal Web site that can increase your search engine ranking position, ways to inject SEO into your mobile site are available as well. The thing aboutmobile search and SEO is that optimization is taken back to the late 90s, when simple things like titles and meta tags worked like gold, and when there wasn’t much competi- tion that knew what they were doing. Just following thebasics canprove tobe successful for many markets that have yet to embrace this newmarketing op- portunity. Unlike SEO techniques for a normal Web site, the list of SEO techniques for the mobile landscape is short, so I’m going to break this into two sections: Technical and SEO elements of mobile Web sites. 28 Mobile SEO