GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 31 - February 2015

Mobile SEO and affiliates By Nick Garner I f you don't believe that mobile SEO is important, look at the graph below. Twenty-two percent of all search traffic now comes from mobile. And according to BRIGHTEDGE, a large SEO business, 27 percent of mobile sites are not configured properly. Digital marketing authority eMarketer expected that 4.55 bil- lion people worldwide would use a mobile phone in 2014. Global mobile smartphone usage is on the rise as well, total- ing 1.75 billion users for 2014. These numbers are very big, and even though they don't really have much to do with everyday affiliate marketing, this much is clear: Smartphone/tablet adoption is here, and it’s pervasive. As a result, it makes sense to think about your website and make sure it does well on mobile search rankings. With mobile SEO there are some serious misconceptions around how to rank. Before we go there, it's worth explain- ing how search engines work with mobile search. Crawlers There are two crawlers, one for desktop and the other for mobile. The mobile crawler looks at your website as if it were a mobile browser. The reason there are two crawlers is because Google is look- ing at your site both as a desktop user and as a mobile user. Here are the mobile user agents Google uses: Feature phone Googlebot-Mobile SAMSUNG-SGH-E250/1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/ CLDC-1.1 UP.Browser/6.2.3.3.c.1.101 (GUI) MMP/2.0 (com- patible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.Google.com/ bot.html) DoCoMo/2.0 N905i(c100;TB;W24H16) (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; + http://www.Google.com/bot.html ) Smartphone Googlebot Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; + http://www.Google.com/bot.html ) COVER STORY SMART PHONE SHARES OF ORGANIC SEARCHES Source: http://gpwa.org/374 SHARES Mobile SEO and affiliates