All Search Engine Optimizers agree that your site must be mobile-friendly. But, the fact is, mobile-friendliness must be one of the primary factors while designing SEO strategies. An improved Mobile SEO is simply the result of two things – enhance your website performance and leave your visitor with a remarkable mobile experience.
What do you call a mobile friendly website?
A mobile-friendly website loads quickly and properly on smartphones, tablets and other pocket size devices; has high readability, not requiring the visitor to zoom in; enough room to navigate through the site and; easy to understand by search robots with use of mobile SEO.
How important is Mobile SEO?
Unlike the traditional SEO approach, search engine optimization is not just limited to the desktops. Analytics has begun to record a massive boost in search traffics through mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Here, mobile SEO becomes extremely important. It ensures that your website content is presented to mobile users in the best possible way. If a site is not smartly optimized for mobile users, it can miss the chances to rank high in SERP.
In this blog, we will discuss a checklist of things we need to focus on for a well mobile-search optimized site:
- Make it Responsive: Out of the multiple technologies available, responsive web design is most important. One possible reason for this is, it is recommended by Google. It makes your site on one URL, which lets Google to easily understand and index the site. On platforms like WordPress, in most cases the themes are responsive by defaults and adjust all screens. But if not, you should ask your developer to fix it.
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Boost website Speed: One of the recent Google updated says that the website loading speed will now play a very important part in search ranking. You’ll immediately leave a site and probably won’t return if it is taking too long to display the content. The ideal loading time is less than 3 seconds. Some common practices to achieve this are:
- optimized and compressed images
- use of minified JavaScript and CSS
- enable browser caching to save the page elements that don’t change
- resist from making countless redirects.
- Don’t block JavaScript, HTML and CSS: It makes tough for search engines to reach out to your site if you block resources like JavaScript, HTML, CSS etc., which will result in down-ranking.
- Focus on Clarity: Reconsider the typography on your website by checking on various devices and make the necessary changes if there are any. This will ascertain the readability of your website.
- Add the right Viewport: Among many SEOs, this is considered the first step towards making your website mobile SEO friendly. It determines how the website will appear on specific devices. Failing to do this will simply show the desktop view of the site on small screen mobile phones. I bet, you don’t want that.
- Don’t irritate visitors with pop-ups: Allowing excessive and irrelevant pop-ups and ads on your website will not only increase the bounce rate but will also get it penalized by Google as per the last Google Panda update.
- Make use of Google AMPs: Google allows you to wrap the website content in special light-weight HTML scripts, called Accelerated Mobile Pages. This benefits as a ranking factor for in search engines as well as increases the dwell time due to enhanced loading speed.