posted June 23rd, 2009
The interesting thing about the mythical “year of mobile” is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If site owners believe in the year of mobile enough to create content, they expand the reach of mobile, the lack of which is what most pundits use to determine whether or not this is the year of mobile. The problem is, many site owners are waiting until the “year of mobile” is unquestionably here before they create content, ensuring that said “year” will take even longer to arrive. The only way that we can ever reach the year of mobile is if we create mobile content now. This will expand the reach of mobile, and cause brand advertisers to feel that they can reach a large enough audience to justify their ad spend.
That said, there are some companies who should have started creating mobile content years ago, and are extremely late to the party. I mentioned a few of these in my SES Chicago presentation on Monetizing Mobile Search late last year. To find out if your brand should be investing heavily in mobile today, or simply creating a basic mobile user experience, use these three free tools.
posted June 18th, 2009
Having specialized in mobile SEO for about as long as people have been talking about it, I have seen many experts say many things about the practice of making content accessible to and optimized for mobile users. Not all of these things make sense. There are two things specifically that I want to call out today that have somehow persisted as mobile SEO best practices, even though following them could actually make you less visible to mobile users. There may have been a time and place for making these recommendations in mobile SEO, as the landscape has changed dramatically even in the last five years. But if you hear them brought up in 2009 and beyond, check the speaker’s business card, as they may be your competitor trying to sabotage you in mobile search. More likely they’re well-intentioned, but not considering all aspects of the issue. To be safe, take time to educate yourself on how and why to avoid these two worst practices.
posted June 16th, 2009
Got your attention, didn’t I?
Actually, Matt hasn’t yet discussed mobile search ranking factors to my knowledge, though he has discussed the mobile search opportunity in 2009 many times in various interviews. This can change, however, if democracy is not against me, and if you also want to see him speak about SEO for mobile users [...]
posted June 15th, 2009
Google’s mobile keyword tool moved with the AdWords redesign. When I was looking for it the other day I wondered for a minute if Google had eliminated it from the new version of AdWords. I was happy to find that this wasn’t the case.
I’m thinking many of you may have the same concerns, as I’m [...]
posted June 13th, 2009
I wanted to make sure that everyone interested in mobile search and mobile SEO had a chance to see this presentation from last month’s Searchology 2009, or at least to review the transcript. It’s important for marketers who are interested in mobile because it confirms that Google is returning optimized mobile web sites ahead of [...]
posted May 7th, 2009
I’m a big fan of the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube, which is really a great training resource for both beginner and experienced SEOs and webmasters. Yesterday I stumbled across this video and presentation from Google’s Ankit Gupta from Google SearchMasters India conference on Building Mobile Friendly Web Sites.
Not all of it is relevant [...]
posted April 24th, 2009
I was writing an article on App Store SEO and decided to mine the App Store search suggest to see if it could tell me anything about how users navigated the app store through search. The results are below. To discover this list I put the letters of the alphabet into the search engine to find popular queries around that letter. The result was a list of 260 keywords, 228 of which were unique.
posted April 21st, 2009
Many exciting things going on and no time to report. However, you can keep yourselves busy with the new Mobile SEO Wiki. Design4Mobile recently did a wiki page on mobile SEO as part of their wonderful mobile design wiki, but I wanted to expand the content and invite my mobile SEO friends to contribute to [...]
posted March 27th, 2009
I had mentioned the YouTube video keyword research tool in my Advanced Keyword Research Tactics presentation at SMX West in February, just a day after the tool was released. For those of you who weren’t there, however, you may have seen from vidiSEO or other video SEO focused blogs that YouTube released a keyword tool to help users find video-specific keywords. Video search behavior is often radically different than web search behavior, so the video keyword research tool can be used to mine popular video queries, which can be used to optimize video content or create YouTube sponsored listings.
posted March 26th, 2009
If you’re the world’s most popular search engine, it’s difficult serve perfectly relevant results 100% of the time to 100% of the population. Especially for niche industries like Mobile SEO, where the first result for related terms for the past 4 years has been a site that hasn’t been updated since 2005. As a searcher, you can help Google improve their results by letting them know which sites you prefer through new features such as Preferred Sites and SearchWiki. If you like the content you see here and want it returned more often when you’re doing related searches, please consider adding it to your list of Google preferred sites, or voting it up in Google’s SearchWiki. Here’s how…
posted March 17th, 2009
Not that I don’t usually think mobile, but Wednesday and Thursday of this week I will be thinking mobile with the brightest minds in the mobile industry at the ThinkMobile conference in NYC. Looking forward to seeing some of my esteemed colleagues in the mobile industry, including David Berkowitz, Greg Sterling, Rachel Pasqua and Peggy Anne Salz, who will be talking about opportunities in mobile search and SEO. If you’re in NY, don’t miss the show, and if you’re going to the show, feel free to reach out and say hello.
posted March 7th, 2009
If you have a cameraphone with the Microsoft tag app installed, you can access the new mobile version of this blog without typing a character or opening a browser. Just point your camera at the tag below and take a picture, and the smart code will take you to related content on your phone.
Thanks [...]
posted March 1st, 2009
Hopefully my mobile friends will allow me to switch to the other part of this blog’s title and talk about natural search again, after spending so much time on mobile-specific SEO. Before I start I want to remind my readers that this is a personal blog with a disclaimer stating that these are my opinions and not necessarily those of Resolution Media or our parent company, Omnicom Media Group.
posted February 23rd, 2009
Given that I’m a voracious reader of Search Engine Land and great admirer of Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and others involved in the blog, it’s my great pleasure to also be a contributor to Search Engine Land
posted February 23rd, 2009
My wife and I just
got back from seeing the Reader and are currently, like many Americans, watching the Oscars. I wanted
to quickly post a movie related mobile tip, and then try to predict
the winners with mobile search volume via the new Google Mobile
keyword tool.
