Mobile sites! Any advice or suggestions for building one?
-
Hello Mozland,
I'm looking to have a mobile site built. We have a fair amount of traffic coming from smart phones, tablets etc and want to capture this traffic better.
Do you have any advice on how to have it built properly, if/how it can be optimised, what good features to include, or anything else you think might be of help?
Many thanks
Martin
-
Using media selectors you do not need to have a separate mobile site on a different domain, nor do you have to use a redirect. Instead it resizes your corporate site based on the users screen resolution.
For example, here is my portfolio site (not anywhere close to being done). However, it uses HTML5 and CSS3 to resize based on the size of the browser screen. So try slowly resizing your browser when viewing it and you will see what i am talking about.
The SEO benefits of this are:
- No duplicate content since it uses the same page
- You link splitting since there are not multiple domains or subdomains of content
So instead of creating a new mobile site, you would make updates to your current corporate site.
edit: It is also important to mention that only current browsers can render CSS3 so anything before IE9 or early versions of Chrome or Firefox will simply display the website in its full version. Any newer browsers (especially smartphones) will render CSS3 hence giving the graceful degradation to the users!
-
Ok, so I'm not tech savy, and as I mentioned, I don't think my developers know about this either.
So, if I want a .mobi site built, this'll be completely separate to the .co.uk full site, right? How do the redirects work to a .mobi site when viewed on a smart phone or tablet, how is it that this'll be the site that's returned in searches to be viewed in those platforms as opposed to the full site?
-
Alan is spot on with the CSS3 reference to media selectors! Try to search around on "responsive design" there are some great articles on how to have your website respond to the user without having to create multiple site for each experience. This approach wil also benefit you since you won't have to have your mobile site on a different domain or sub-domain and you will have no worries with duplicate content.
-
i dont think too many people have, i made that test for when someone asks
-
Thanks Alan,
I will pass this on to the developers (who don't seem to have built a .mobi site before).
-
I have made a test site, i used CSS, where you can have one set of css for screens less that a certain width, and 1 for wider pages. you will also need the metat tag below that will set your page to the correct width for each phone.
So when a mobile comes to the page, its sets a width lets say 320px, then your css will take over (note: set to <850)
you can then set a layout for the small screen, this way you can have 2 layouts in the sdame page, and keep the rank, rather then having one page for browsers and one for mobiles
if you want to see it work, try this link, it is a simple example, and i have not tested it on a phone, (I am one of the few poeple in the world that does not have a mobile phone) http://news.thatsit.net.au/
.myclass{ for the main page }
@media only screen and (max-width: 850px)
{.myClass{ for the mobile page}
}
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Dealing with the impending Google mobile compliance update - is bMobilized any good as a temporary measure?
We've been caught a bit off guard with the upcoming Google mobile compliance issue and received the warnings in webmasters about fixing mobile usability issues. It will still be some time before we can have the site re-coded as responsive. I have stumbled upon a converter tool (which turns any site into one that's mobile friendly) called bMobilized, which essentially turns your site into one that's mobile friendly. Have you used bMobilized? Is it a safe idea to use this service temporarily until our new responsive site is ready in a few months? Do you have any suggestions for temporarily getting around the mobile compliance issue while our new responsive site is being built? Thanks
Web Design | | Martin_S0 -
SSL, SEO, and Site Migration question
When migrating a site to a new url and one where the old url had no https and the new url will be full https does it matter if the 301 redirect points at http://thisisthenewsite.com ? Meaning, should the new site have the ssl / https up prior to redirecting the old site? Does it matter if you redirect the old site to http://thisisthenewsite.com or https://thisisthenewsite.com? Since the site will force to https anyway?
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Internal linking for small site
I have a site with 13 pages, 6 are product pages, 5 are free tips pages (the other 2 are the home page and contact form). Currently I have the navbar at top of site with a "products" dropdown menu for the 6 product pages and a "Tips" dropdown menu for the 5 tip pages. All categories except the contact page are at the bottom as breadcrumbs, the homepage is "home" and the rest are relevant user friendly keyword anchor text. So I have 2 more pages to ad to "Tips" and am wondering whether to have a new 2nd level tips page that links to a 3rd level of 7 different tips pages, or keep it shallow as it is, with only 2 levels from the homepage to the other (now 13) pages, with a potential of 22 pages in the foreseable few years? (and some graphics work to make it user friendly like how Zappo's has categories to the side on each of its drop down navbar menu's and non-link text categories for its bottom of page breadcrumb links) Can those aforementioned pages linking to each other in the footer dilute link equity? (I think that's one of the primary reasons I'm curious). What do you think of this: http://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/2012/08/08/internal-linking-101-5-best-practices/ (I guess I should no follow my contact page), could it be better to have a 2nd level page for "Tips" to get more equity to that page rather than across all 7 tips pages? I have read around about this on here (hence how I found out about Zappo's) and elsewhere and wanted ask to make sure.
Web Design | | Zoolander0 -
Suggestions of some video CMS platforms?
Hi SEOmoz Community! Looking for some suggestions on video sharing CMS platforms. I haven't messed around with video sharing for a few years now and seems like a lot of the previous ones I know about are pretty much dead like PHPmotion. If anyone has any good experiences whether paid or free open source platforms, I'd like to hear what are some good options? TIA!
Web Design | | William.Lau0 -
How SEO friendly (or unfriendly) this site structure is
We have a client who wants a site structure like this http://thethomasoliverband.com/home - try to scroll down on the content and see how the url of the site changes. Would there be any problems on trying to SEO this type of structure?
Web Design | | paulct0 -
Will upgrading my dedicated server improve my site speed
hi, at the moment i am concerned about my site speed for www.in2town.co.uk My hosting company is tmd hosting and my package is Intel Atom 330 1MB L2 Cache 1.6GH $159/mo $189/month500GBStorage4GBRAM10TBBandwidthi am looking at increasing this to**$219/mo** $289/month500GBStorage6GBRAM10TBBandwidthcan anyone let me know if this will make a difference to my site speed please
Web Design | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Effect of Off-Site Images
I'm getting to start work with a new client, and I've run across something I've never had to deal with before, off-site images. The site I'll be working on is for an appliance retailer, both online and physical. The way they've had their site built (not something I was part of) a third party company maintains the product inventory side of things. They're sourcing from about 35 different manufacturers, and this third party has direct access to the product information streams. They push the weekly updated information to my clients site. What this means, though, is that the product images don't live on the client's site. They're hotlinked from the third party's inventory doohickey. I've never seen something quite like this before. Has anyone else? Any ideas as to what problems I may face when it comes to on-site SEO?
Web Design | | MRCSearch0 -
Advice on migrating from .com to .co.uk without dropping in rank?
I have a retail business in the UK whose website has *.com address and it has taken 3 years to reach a page rank of 3. We are building an updated site which will have a completely new url structure and optimized for SEO. We are considering launching the new site at a *.co.uk as we understand this will have advantages in local search and ranking as we are primarily targeting UK traffic. Does anyone have comments on **.com vs .co.uk and/or have any advice on how to handle the migration while minimizing any drop in traffic and ranking?
Web Design | | brian.james0