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Why you need a mobile version of your website

23 February 2012

Firstly why do you have a web site? To garner more traffic and show off your wares. These may be products or services. Once your users have found you, you want them to make a decision and do something. This activity may be to buy, subscribe to a newsletter, tell a friend, make a booking etc.

Now, what is a mobile version of your site? Basically, this means making your website useful for mobile users, be it on a mobile smart phone, iPad or other tablet. Your mobile users will be able to see everything that is important on your site and be able to act as you wish them to.

Before you scoff at people doing business on their phones, consider this: when you walked out the door this morning you picked up your keys, wallet and mobile, or your handbag which had keys, wallet, makeup, tissues… and mobile phone. In any one room of business people, or any gathering of Baby Boomers, Gen X or Y, you would have a difficult time finding a person who does not carry a mobile phone. Based on the ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone, by far more used than newspapers, TV, radio or any other mainstream mass media, you need to have a web site which can be utilised by these devices.

Whilst every mobile phone is not web enabled, the latest research shows that 37% of Australians have a smartphone (Source: The Mobile Movement Study, Google/Ipsos OTX MediaCT, Apr 2011), which is # 2 worldwide for smart phone penetration (Singapore is #1).

This very same research established that there was a 220% year on year increase in retail queries by mobile (2010-2011), only 20% of retailers have a mobile website. Wouldn’t you like your business to be in the 20% rather than the hidden 80%?

Depending on the type of business you run, you want to decide if your mobile site will be fully transactional or just offer a selection, be it information or sales. The mobile environment is particularly appealing to having a simply loaded site with locations, times, phone numbers etc- the basics. This means a quick solution to encourage visits to bricks & mortar outlets. Additionally you may add stock levels (such as Ikea) or specials only.

The future of geographic offers is coming, using locational technology, offers can be tailored to where you physically are. It will be easier to move to these specially targeted offers if you already have a usable mobile site.

Currently many websites are not suitable at all for mobile viewing, they are disjointed and can take 60 seconds or more to load. For those that are creating mobile sites, they see their traffic and conversions increasing as soon as a mobile version is implemented.

When a potential user has a poor experience, either your site is unreadable, very slow or doesn’t load at all, this can lead to a bad impression of your organisation. Turning around that negative interaction is an added imposition to businesses which never needed to happen.

Three basic ideas to work with which will improve your website for mobile users include:

  1. Reduce bandwidth to make your site load faster
  2. Scale back some of your content and lower resolution, keep the essentials: maps, directions, phone numbers, operating hours etc
  3. Have an interface that shows the content most applicable to mobile users first. Geographic offers, maps, phone numbers, directions etc.

Your website is the front door to your world, don’t forget that not everyone will walk the same path to it. For a small investment, be in the earlier adopters with a mobile version of your website and your site may be the only one in your category that users ‘on the go’ can enjoy!

Filed Under: Mobile Websites, Search Engine Optimisation, Site Architecture, Web Design Tagged With: , , , ,

Using webmaster tools to work smarter, not harder

17 February 2012

As all business people know, there are only so many hours in a day. Each time Google or other online tool adds a new variable or application, there is the potential for webmasters to feel that they just cannot do any more. We have discovered that adding Webmaster tools to your routine may in fact save you time and make you more efficient.

What are ‘Webmaster Tools’?

These are a set of free tools created by Google to highlight the relative ‘health’ of any of the websites you manage. It’s a bit like a doctor scanning the chart at the end of a hospital bed, looking at the most important factors and focussing just on anomalies. Without having to review in detail every potential web measure, you can spend time on those that have issues. The end result is improved visibility of your site to Google’s search engines, this will make your site easier to find by your visitors.

To initially set up your site with Webmaster Tools, you need to go to the Google Webmaster Tool to register your account. There are several ways to verify your account, these are all presented to you in this registration section. Once you have added the details, it may take a few hours to actually become available.

On registration, your site will be visible in the Webmaster Tools page. Click on your site and you will be taken to the Dashboard. The Dashboard includes a summary of:

  • Search Queries which have brought traffic to your site
  • Crawl Errors – check at a glance if there are any roadblocks for the Google search bots on your site which may stop them finding your content
  • Keywords- the most common words on your site. These are useful to identify if you are using enough of the keywords you believe your potential users would look for.
  • Sitemaps- you can check there is a valid sitemap for your site as well as the ability to create and test one. Sitemaps are a critical entry point for the Google bots to begin searching your site.
  • Links to your site- who and how they link to your site

From the Dashboard you can click on each item to investigate further. The critical factor to enjoy with Webmaster Tools is that it presents you with this summary. Become the master of exceptions, which means you no longer have to review every single piece of data available for your web site, merely the items that stand out as issues or opportunities.

Therefore the outcome of working smarter using Webmaster Tools and not harder is to free up your time for more creative, proactive or business building experiences.

Filed Under: Tools Tagged With: , , ,

Google’s New “Page Layout” Algorithm Seeks to Penalise Sites Which are Top-Heavy with Ads

6 February 2012

If you are tired of swimming through all those ads on top of the screen when landing upon a certain page, then you have a reason to be happy as Google announced on January 19, 2012 that it will be identifying sites which are doing this practice and will be penalising them accordingly. Sites identified as violating this page layout algorithm will be tagged by Google and shall not be ranked as highly as they used to or should be in succeeding searches.

Google refused to set a firm guideline however as to how much ads on top of a page is really “too much” so to speak, instead they are letting the individual publishers decide for themselves and encouraged them to use their Google Browser Size Tool and other similar tools to make a decision as to how much of their page’s content should be left unobscured by ads at first glance.

Google further stressed that this new algorithm will only be affecting those pages which have an abnormally high number of ad placements above-the-fold such that it eventually makes it difficult for users to find the actual content. Sites which are placing ads above-the-fold in a normal manner don’t have to worry, as they will not be affected, especially since Google also recognises that these are prime real estate for advertising spots which make up a major part of the monetisation program of most sites.

By Google’s own estimate, there are not that many websites that would be affected by this change however. They reckon that it will only affect less than 1% of all searches globally. Website publishers will know if they have been tagged for violating this algorithm if they suddenly see a drop in traffic to their site and they know that they have been top-heavy with ads all along then chances are they have been tagged because of this new algorithm. Their site’s ranking will be decreased once they are tagged which explains the sudden drop in traffic to their site.

If a site is already tagged, publishers can actually implement the necessary changes in order to gain Google’s good graces once again but the penalty may not be immediately lifted as fast as they would want it to be. Google explains that even though the page layout algorithm automatically detects any changes that may be adopted, it will still take as much as several weeks for their system to assess the overall changes of an entire site depending on the number of pages in the site and how efficiently Google bot can crawl the contents.

While this news is a welcome development for most users, some would still contend that much is still to be desired as far as regulating these advertisements are concerned as there are still way too much advertisements in some sites which cannot be categorised as above-the-fold per se but are very annoying still the same.

Google closed their announcement by saying that this change is just one in about 500 improvements that they expect to implement within the year in their continuing effort to deliver the best possible user experience.

George Peterson currently works for one of the leading search marketing agencies in Denmark – Outrider. He currently works as a SEO manager.

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: , , , ,