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.

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.

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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

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.

This great tip for using Google Analytics for mobile analytics was first brought to my attention by Craig Hordlow of Red Bricks Media in iMedia Connection. Instead of using filters and creating a separate profile, I’ve set up custom segments in the latest version of Google Analytics in order to compare mobile traffic to desktop traffic or smartphone traffic to mobile traffic easily. Here’s how:

I want to preface this post by saying that I am employed full-time by Resolution Media and am offering this limited mobile marketing checklist and guide for a nominal fee in order to help those who don’t have the resources to hire me and my colleagues at Resolution Media, or employ an agency or consultant to help them in their SEO efforts. It’s not an alternative to hiring an agency or a consultant, but it’s an affordable way to begin to understand mobile SEO indexing and ranking factors for those who have no other options. If you’re interested in partnering with an industry leader for your long-term natural search (including mobile) strategy, the checklist and mobile SEO seminar I’m about to describe are definitely not a substitute. They are, however, good places to start for the uninitiated, and the nominal fee allows me to control access to the information, while helping those who read this blog and are interested in mobile SEO get a taste of the type of understanding that’s necessary to execute mobile SEO successfully, even if they have limited budgets. If you want to discuss a long-term partnership with thought leaders in monetizing emerging media, including mobile search, you can hire me and my team on a full-time basis by contacting Resolution Media

At the beginning of the new year I’ve noticed a lot of backwards-looking traffic in my analytics. Many of you are finding this blog while looking for insight into the top mobile search queries entered in 2008. A number of other blogs reported these in December of 2008 when the engines released them, but to my knowledge none of them gave search volume for the queries, and few places have even aggregated the content into a single page. Therefore, search and you shall receive… I give you the top mobile search terms of 2008, as reported by Yahoo! Mobile, AOL Mobile and Google Mobile India: