Most of my readers are marketers, and probably weren’t at WWW2008 on April 25 in order to see the presentation of the brilliant new study of mobile queries, Deciphering Mobile Search Patterns: A Study of Yahoo! Mobile Search Queries by Yi, Maghoul and Pedersen of Yahoo!. I wasn’t either, but since we now have access to a PDF of the report, we can see what we missed. Here’s a high level overview for those of you who, like me, aren’t computer scientists, but are still interested in how mobile users search.

If you’re looking for my recap of the Mobile Monday session, that should be posted on the Find Resolution blog later today. Here are the best of the rest from this past week, via my del.icio.us bookmarks.

If you're in or around Manhattan, don't forget to join us tomorrow night for the Mobile Monday NY panel discussion on Mobile Analytics, Mobile Social Search and optimizing for the mobile user. All of the vendors from the Mobile SEO's Guide to Mobile Analytics will be there, along with representatives from Tig Tags, Taptu and ESPN Mobile. We'llbe discussing how Mobile SEO differs from traditional SEO in terms of indexing, ranking algorithms, tracking and optimization, so it should be of interest to all regular readers of this blog. I'll be doing a recap later this week for the benefit of those who can't be there, but for those who can, please RSVP here if you haven't already.

Light week for natural search and mobile SEO news. Here are my del.icio.us bookmarks for the week of April 20, 2008.

Highlights from my del.icio.us bookmarks for the week of April 13, 2008.

The best of the Russ Beattie Mobile Web is Dead rebuttals, Google's mobile search growth announcement from their Q1 earnings report, and some good basic SEO advice from Google on accessibility and permanent redirects.

The best of my del.icio.us links for the week of April 6, 2008.

Highlights from my delicious bookmarks for the week of March 30, 2008.


Mobile as Bridge Between Old Media, Internet and POS
Several mobile visual search developments position mobile as a way of tracking success of print and broadcast media.

Bango announces high mobile conversion rates
Probably not a good idea to release this on April Fool's Day, but 2-8% average conversion rate is no laughing matter.

DeviceAtlas
Large database of mobile device information.

Microsoft To Upgrade Mobile IE Browser, Live Search For Mobile With New Mapping Features And Voice Search For Blackberries
MSN announces new mobile search improvements, including voice search for Blackberries.

Find Resolution: Building Links with Big Brand Websites, Part 2
Tactics for link building for larger sites.

Yahoo Introduces Wide Range Of Mobile Search Improvements
Information on the Yahoo! mobile voice et al announcement.

Today's iPhone Users are Young, Rich, and Technically Savvy - ReadWriteWeb
More iPhone demographic information.

CTIA: Sprint Uses 'Instinct' To Compete With iPhone - InformationWeek
Here come the iPhone clones. Announcing Instinct.

Inside the Marketers Studio: Five Paths to Mobile Search
Great post about different mobile search use cases.

Jupiter Research Predicts Big Business For Mobile Ads, Marketing : Mobile Marketing Watch
"Jupiter Research sees little reason to doubt that mobile advertising and marketing will continue expanding and thriving in the coming years."

Because the engines often favor aged content, and mobile SEO has just taken off in the past several years, the search engines aren't always the first places to look when it comes to looking for good mobile SEO information. These are resources I recommend for consistently good information on mobile SEO. In order to be included here the resource must be a recognized expert in mobile search engine optimization or have a page or site devoted to making search engine-friendly mobile web sites that is regularly updated. I've also included some links to sites on mobile development and mobile analytics because of the synergy with mobile SEO. For a complete list of resources, for all things Natural Search and Mobile SEO, please see my del.icio.us bookmarks.For blogs that I follow, please see my Technorati profile. Finally, if you see a site that should be included on this list and is mobile SEO-related (i.e. not mobile advertising, general mobile search, general mobile marketing or mobile news), please list it in the nofollowed comments. If I agree, I'll include it here permanently.

In an earlier post I mentioned that the Jumptap Mobile Keyword Tool can be used to find mobile keywords from AT&T’s MEdia Net Mobile Content Search Engine. However, because you can’t directly link to the tool, and the AT&T DevCentral site is not exactly intuitive, more than one user has been unable to locate the tool. With sympathy, I present these six simple steps to finding the Jumptap Mobile Keyword Tool.

Many of you remember the Mobile Search Optimization white paper that Resolution Media developed in August of last year. We developed it partially as a vehicle to help brands understand the opportunity inherent in mobile search, but primarily to help them navigate the mobile search landscape with as much knowledge to succeed as possible. It served its purpose at the time, but an update is in order.

I’ve already begun updating it and will be releasing a serialized version on this blog in the next couple months. For now I’ve moved the PDF version of the white paper to its new home on this blog. Please update your bookmarks. I’ll be permanently redirecting it and the MobileSearchOptimization.com domain soon.

As I mentioned in my last post on mobile analytics, over the next couple of months I will be reviewing various technologies used in mobile development and optimization from a mobile SEO’s perspective. Now that mobile analytics is out of the way, I’ll be moving on to tools used in helping to build mobile web sites, which are sometimes called mobilizers. I’ll be contacting companies individually as I did for the mobile analytics overview, but if there are any great solutions out there that are not as easy to find, I want to invite users or creators of these solutions to be included in the mobile site creator review. If you own or know of a great tool, please don’t keep it like a secret. Contact me at bryson [dot]meunier[at]gmail.com and I will add it to the list of tools for potential review.

It should probably go without saying, but if you are the owner of a mobile web site creator that improperly distributes link popularity, mangles URLs or doesn't use the text available to communicate to users and spiders, you might want to hold off on hitting the send button until those issues are fixed. All recommendations are welcome, but those that help a mobile webmaster deliver crawlable content quickly are especially so.

As marketers look to take advantage of the opportunity inherent in mobile search in 2008, many of them are going to be looking to various technologies to help them get mobile faster (mobilizers), track mobile users better (mobile analytics), understand mobile search behavior (mobile keyword research tools), gain link popularity to their mobile sites (mobile directories), and become accessible to mobile search engines and the highest number of mobile users (mobile validators and emulators). To facilitate this process, I will be looking at these technologies and processes over the next couple of months, and pointing out advantages and disadvantages of each for the mobile optimizer. Today I'll be looking at mobile analytics, including why they're necessary and what options are currently available to the mobile SEO.

If you manage digital content for a Fortune 500 site, you may be as tired as I am of the focus so many SEO sites seem to have on optimization for small business sites. No doubt small businesses are equally important, and there are far more people optimizing content for small to mid-size businesses (including me and my team), but there are a number of us out here with other problems that don't get nearly as much attention.

Though this is primarily a blog dealing with optimizing mobile content for mobile search engines, in my role as a consultant I need to understand how to optimize many types of digital content for many types of search engines. In this industry I've met many who are mobile marketers first and SEOs second. I'm an SEO first and a mobile marketer second. That said, it always perplexes me when I hear my fellow SEOs claim that SEO for mobile is basically SEO for the web, as in many cases the two couldn't be more different.

If you're wondering how they're different, and you haven't done it yet, be sure to check out my two-part post on the new FindResolution blog, How Mobile SEO is Different, which outlines five key differences between SEO and its mobile counterpart.

Stay tuned this week to the Natural Search and Mobile SEO Blog, where I will be posting more original content related to SEO for Mobile, including a review of several mobile analytics providers and what they offer to the mobile SEO.

If you're wondering what mobile searchers are looking for, these are the top 100 mobile keywords at AT&T's Beyond MEdia Net mobile search engine by volume, followed by breakdowns by subject and query intent. Analysis of these mobile queries led to a few surprising learnings, and some best practices for marketers doing mobile keyword research.

The new Google mobile web index is great for increasing visibility of mobile web sites, but mobile web developers don't have to leave their mobile web site visibility to the big G. This is how mobile developers can ensure their mobile web sites are seen, regardless of which web site the mobile search engines decide to index and rank.