Meryl Heidenreich - Bayshore Solutions Account Manager
By: Meryl Heidenreich – Bayshore Solutions Emarketing Team
Once you’ve decided to have a mobile presence on the web, one of your first decisions will be whether to have a separate mobile site, or make your non-mobile site (for the ease of discussion let’s call it a desktop website) compatible with mobile devices.
If you decide to operate a single website, with identical URLs for mobile and desktop visitors, you will then have to decide if your site will show something different to each user depending on their device (dynamically serving different HTML and CSS (styling) based on whether the user-agent is a mobile device or desktop PC), or if your site will show the same thing (same HTML) to mobile and desktop visitors, with only the CSS changing depending on the device to ensure the page renders for optimal viewing.
With 22% of all Google searches currently being made on mobile devices, and mobile search set to exceed desktop search by 2015, I think you need only look to the search engines for help in making this decision.
On June 6th, and at the Search Marketing Expo Advanced Conference, Google released their official recommendation for building Smartphone-optimized websites: Responsive web design.
A responsive website design is the third configuration I mentioned above, where the server sends the same HTML to every user, and CSS is used to change how the page is displayed to a device using media queries.
Google is recommending responsive web designs for several reasons:
1. Having one URL for a piece of content (instead of a separate URL for the mobile and desktop versions) makes it easier for your visitors to interact with your content (commenting on it, sharing it, linking to it, etc).
2. Having one URL for a piece of content removes all issues of duplicate content, or other points of confusion for search algorithms to determine how toindex your content.
3. No redirects will be necessary to get visitors to the right version of content for their device, thus reducing load-speed, and the likelihood of errors – which is good for SEO and for user-experience.
4. Googlebot can crawl and index content more efficiently with a responsive design – resulting in more of your content being indexed and being kept up to date for search results.
For more information on building mobile-optimized websites, I would recommend visiting Google’s guide to going mobile: http://www.howtogomo.com/ , or for more advanced information on mobile website configurations: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
For help with the creation of your mobile-optimized website, contact Bayshore Solutions.
Meryl Heidenreich is an Account Manager at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.