GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 11 - January 2010

GaryBeal Gary R. Beal is theMDof VanguardSEO in Leeds and has been in the Search Engine Optimization field for 12 years. He attendedOhio StateUni- versity in theU.S. andholds a Master’sDegree inBiometrics andMathematical Statistics. He specializes in SEO for very competitivemarkets,primarily in theGaming,Dating,Travel, Insur- ance and Financial industries.He has spoken atmany SES, SMX, CAP,AAC, EIG,G2E,AIG,GPWA, CAC andA4UExpo conferences around Europe andhas alsobeen ondozens of expert SEOpanels. Gary haswritten specialized articles formultipleonlinemar- ketingpublications andoffers adviceon theGPWA forums. He is knownbest for his free 1-on-1 sessions during conferences and his noncommercial,plain-talk delivery.Theonlineworld knows him as GaryTheScubaGuy andhis Top 12 SEOTips. :) Technical TLD –Don’tworryaboutusinga .mobi;any TLDwilldo fine(.com, .net, .de, .nl,etc.). Coding – Itmust beW3C compliant and must be 100% valid XHTML 1.0 code (www.validator.w3.org ). This works with Google’s interface that delivers 6 results rather than the2or3youwouldnormally see displayed, but will also function on a cheap mobile phone interface. If you wereambitiousyoucouldmake the site in validXHTML (compatibility testatW3C), cHTML,WML (compatibility testat shad- owplay.net) andnormalmark-up (for ful- ly functionalWebphones).Dependingon your market you could show upmultiple times in the same query. (There is nodu- plicate content penalty.) ThereAre3PrimaryLanguageTypes: WML (often calledWAP 1.0) – based on XML–a content-formatting standard. xHTMLMobileProfile (often calledWAP 2.0) –derived from xHTML 1.1 Basic but withadditionalmodules. cHTML or Compact HTML (often called iMode) – uses a subset of the standard HTML2.0, 3.2or4.0 specifications. SiteSize –Keep the site down to as few pages as possible, like 3-6, of which one needs to be an engineered landing page for future endeavors like PPC or conver- sion testing. Content – Unfortunately, the content needs to be 63 characters (give-or-take). Create linked snippetsoneachpage if you need togetmore than this intoonepage. Markup –Sorry,noiFrames,noFlash,no redirects, no auto-refresh, no popups, no spacing graphics, no tables, no scrollbars (orminimum1 ifyoumust),noembedded objects or scripts.Use external CSSand if possiblehaveyourprogrammer loadyour mobile content from a database on the flywith device recognition (like a normal Web page delivering browser-compatible content towhichever phone the end-user is using). And lastly, provide caching in- formation inHTTP responses. MetaTXT –Thenew standard inmobile SEO that helps search engines find your site and classify it. This is similar to the descriptionandkeyword tagsonanormal Web site. Mobi Testing – There are some pretty goodsites thatwill turnyoursite intoamo- bilesite:http://site.mobi,http://mobilizer. volantis.net, http://zinaddo.com , http:// ready.mobi and mtld.mobi/emulator.php willperformabrowsercompatibility test. :) SEO OnPage –Thisworks thesameasregular sites. Title tags that represent a specific keywordorkeywords,H1 tags thatmirror thosekeywords and content that includes the keywords are heavily weighed attri- butes. Be sure tomatch themupwith the metaTXT content. Local Search – Use locations in your metaTXT and title if possible. Most mo- bile apps have a “Search Nearby,” espe- cially the iPhone, which offers hundreds of apps that utilizeGPS location. Universal Search – Yes, Universal Search is abigpart of Google’smobile al- gorithm.Oneofthemostcommonuses for mobile is news, YouTube, GoogleReader, Wikipedia andmany others. These domi- nate the top spots on mobile search. In most cases they show up beforeWeb re- sults as well. Optimize for content only available on mobile search. RSS feeds, images, video and news feeds (press re- leases) are thehot target right now. Local Search – If you are a brick-and- mortar business, get onGoogle Local, Ya- hoo! Local, Ask City, Live Search Maps, Yelp,Yellow,WhitePagesandanyotherdi- rectory, locationormappingservice.These are already widely used on Gphone and iPhone and are sure tobecome a standard feature in thenext-gen lineofphones. Sitemaps – Create and submit separate xml sitemaps toGoogle and Yahoo! just as youdoforyournormalWebsite.Breakthem intosections: images,videos,PDFs,etc. Internal Link Building – This works the same as a regular site. You can PR sculpt the important pages and empha- size keywords with internal anchor text (the linkedwords) that link to the impor-