Other Ways to Give Your Mobile Website an Edge

We all get those “pie in the sky” dreams about what we want to do or what we will do with our websites. However, far too often, those dreams get so grandiose that it’s easier to abandon them than it is to pull them off. We’ve all been there, at one point or another. What if you don’t get around to building that customized website and just stayed exactly where you are right now? What would be the opportunity cost of that mistake?
Fortunately, you can guard yourself against worst case scenarios by taking the time to implement the following tasks that makes the most of the website you ALREADY HAVE!

1. Follow the basic rules of traditional SEO. Don’t spam keywords and phrases. Pay attention to relevance. Put some thought into it, but never sacrifice the human audience experience in order to attract search engine attention. Always aim for organic principles and best practices.

2. Use XHTML coding. Not only is it more forgiving of bugs and errors, it’s one of the universal languages of mobile devices and generally insures accessibility across multiple platforms.

3. Employ external stylesheets and javascript. This will insure higher functionality of your website.

4. Shy away from Flash and other custom apps that may not function across various devices. Remember the old principle of everything - KISS (keep it simple, stupid!)

5. Don’t just optimize your website for the mobile experience - do the same for any videos or audio that you offer on your site.

6. Learn how to use what are known as “jump links” to quickly navigate to important parts of the website that may not be viewable on the mobile screen.

7. When specifying the size of graphic elements, don’t use pixels. Instead, rely upon percentages, that will translate across the board.

8. Don’t forget simple coding changes, like making any phone numbers click-n-call coded. This can save a lot of time. If you’ve ever been on your phone and hit up a search engine for information on a company and then had to hunt down a piece of paper and a pen in order to write it down instead of simply clicking to call, you know exactly how frustrating the oversight can be in the eyes of the end user.

9. As mentioned previously, submit your mobile sites to mobile search engines.

10. Take the time out to create a simple mobile site map that will allow easier navigation for your traffic and easier spider indexing for the search engines.