Going Mobile – Optimize Your Site for Mobile Apps

Like it or not, the mobile revolution has arrived, and brings with it virtual certainty that a LOT of web browsing will be carried out over mobile platforms in the years to come.

While the trusty old desktop and convenient laptop will not be consigned to the junk heap anytime soon, people using smartphones will find ever more capability to do much of what they need to do, especially when it comes to browsing the Web on their mobile devices. It’s only going to get more pervasive!

So how do you make sure your site is ready for this? Will it even show up? How can you best optimize for mobile? These are a few questions we need answers for!

There are basically two areas we need to focus attention on, and that would be your site design, along with getting into mobile search.

Optimizing your website for mobile isn’t as hard as you might think. It involves using what is known as CSS, a Cascading Style Sheet, which is a set of instructions within your website code that tells your site how to render up pages when they are called up by certain elements, such as a mobile browser.

While most smartphones can bring you a webpage in the exact, though miniaturized, version you’d see on any other computer, until smartphones are in more wide distribution, it would be wise to make sure your style sheet contains several of these guidelines. Remember, what we’re after here is simplicity, not beauty!

• Don’t use any Flash or Javascript – make things easy on the engines and on the mobile browsers.

• Avoid fancy background colors. Not only will it take longer to bring up, you’re operating on a very small screen. Readability is paramount. Black text on white is best.

• Remember your size limitations. Most screens are only about 2 X 3 inches or thereabouts, and you want to make sure your content is seen.

• Focus on your content. Remove anything extraneous, like ads, or other apps that get in the way.

• Don’t use any images, unless you simply have to. You can link to them if necessary.

If you are running a Wordpress blog there is an easier solution found by employing a Wordpress plugin for the job, which will render up a mobile sized version of your site instantly.

When it comes to being found in mobile search there are a couple of things you can do. First you need to make sure your site is on both Google and Yahoo local search. This is called on in mobile searches, and will take care of the lion’s share of your mobile search optimization.

Second, the same would apply to your social networks. Users are performing more and more searches every day using Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. Making sure your site is found by these will be more and more critical as time goes on.

Expect ever greater opportunities and applications to come your way as mobile phones and devices begin to plunder their way into your business. Just make sure you are ready to be found!