I may ride the CTA on a regular basis, but there’s little I think they do right in terms of my public transportation needs. I even signed up as a Mystery Shopper so I could take them to task for making me sit on someone’s lap every morning on my way to work. However, as far as mobile is concerned, their CTA Bus Tracker service exploits mobility, makes content accessible, and advertises it where mobile users are, and thus gets the honor of being the first site in my mobile SEO best practices series that actually does mobile SEO right.

I wanted to break the silence for a minute to let readers know that, in spite of my apparent inactivity, I am actually hard at work. This is my personal blog, so updating it is not always a priority; but it will be updated soon enough with more original content on natural search and mobile SEO. Several things in the works, including a mobile SEO's guide to mobile site creators, version 2 of the mobile SEO's guide to mobile analytics, an iPhone query study, an update of the Mobile SEO White Paper, and a few other things. In the interim, you may be interested in checking out any one of several articles and blog posts that have come out recently:

Search Marketing Standard

Mobile Optimization Essentials
Fall 2008 issue
The article is only in the print version of the magazine, but if you have access to a copy I would highly recommend checking it out. Includes articles by mobile gurus Kim Dushinski and Bena Roberts, as well as information that I hadn't shared on this blog previously about mobile SEO.If you've read the article, please leave your comments in the article's forum.

FindResolution

Don't Pay $6 Million for SEO
Published September 9, 2008
About the recent Target accessibility settlement, and how it impacts SEO.

SEO Stands for "Always Keep Learning"
Published August 25, 2008
Five tips for learning search marketing beyond conferences.

SEO Doesn't Die. SEOs do.
Published August 18, 2008
A response to the recent SEO is dead resurgence. Personally I think the movement is better off dead.

A Quick Lesson in Title Tag Optimization
Published August 13, 2008
Quick steps to title tag improvements, using Search Engine Watch as an example.

SEO for Broadcast Media
Published July 24, 2008
How to optimize a television commercial for search.

Google Makes Flash Better, Not Best for SEO
Published July 10, 2008
About the recent improvements from Google in indexing Flash.


If you're a social bookmarker like me and you like any of these articles, Sphinns, Diggs and Stumbles are appreciated as always.

Thanks again for your patience. Stay tuned to the Natural Search and Mobile SEO blog for more original insights into SEO and mobile.

If you're on Facebook and you like this blog, be sure to join our Facebook group. It's a simple page for discussion, networking, promotion, topic suggestions, and everything but mindless comment spam, which will be deleted.

Join the Natural Search and Mobile SEO Facebook group here.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m not a dotMobi hater and actually disagree with my esteemed colleague Cindy Krum and others who are calling for (or declaring) the "death of the .mobi" at this year’s SES San Jose. On the contrary, there’s evidence to suggest that dotMobi is growing faster than most TLDs and the organization itself deserves credit for foregrounding a positive mobile user experience when so many consumers cite a poor user experience as a reason for avoiding the mobile Web. By contributing resources for mobile developers and mobile marketers and actively promoting mobility, as an organization they have done more than most to speed adoption of the mobile Web, and in turn the marketing to users of the mobile Web that we’ve all been hoping for. There are actually many reasons to acquire a dotMobi domain for your site (direct navigation and usability among them), but none of them, currently, involve SEO.

It was, of course, my great honor to speak at SMX Local & Mobile in San Francisco three weeks ago, and I think that the organizers and participants deserve credit for putting together the premier search conference for discussing opportunities in Local & Mobile search. I would almost say that it was, actually, worth postponing my honeymoon for. However, I believe someone needs to clarify that there is an ampersand in between local and mobile for a reason. To be clear: there is local search, there is mobile search, there is local search on mobile devices and mobile search with local intent, but all mobile search is not local in nature. In fact, not even most of it is.

Thanks to Read/Write/Web for pointing me to this article in the Wall Street Journal on revenue from Apple's iPhone App Store. Wanted to quickly point it out to readers as a clear illustration of someone monetizing mobile today. Too often in conversations of mobile marketing there is a reliance on future opportunity, as though we're all talking about mobile in order to make money from it sometime when the primary use for such a thing is to buy the latest flying car model. It's important to note that those who create compelling mobile content for Apple's App Store are making money today. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has made about $1 million per day since the App Store launched, 70% of which goes to developers.



Flying car image copyright HowStuffWorks.

I'm about to head downstairs for registration at SMX Local & Mobile in San Francisco and wanted to take a minute to share my presentations with regular blog readers and attendees. If you're new here, feel free to look around for more mobile SEO tips, and subscribe to the feed for regular updates.

When I first asked my fiancée if she would mind if we postponed our honeymoon for a week so that I could speak at SMX Local & Mobile, she looked at me like I was crazy before eventually giving me the green light. Since I’m getting married this Friday, and would have gone on my honeymoon immediately afterward, the timing, quite frankly, couldn’t have been worse. Still, there are very good reasons to attend SMX Local & Mobile, even if you’re not speaking at it and the timing could be better. Chris Sherman mentioned a few of them on Search Engine Land earlier this month, but these are the four that made me postpone my honeymoon.

I’m honored this year to be presenting at SMX Local Mobile. For those unfamiliar, SMX (Search Marketing Expo) Local Mobile is the only annual search marketing conference that I know of devoted to strategies and tactics for local and mobile search. It’s organized by search marketing veterans and Search Engine Land writers Chris Sherman and Greg Sterling and features a number of other respectable consultants whom I’ve worked with or followed online, such as Cindy Krum, David Berkowitz, Jonathan Ashton and Chris Silver Smith. The conference takes place July 24 and July 25 at the JW Marriott in San Francisco and should be two days of cutting edge conversations and networking with some of the biggest names in local and mobile search.

The agenda is now posted at the SMX Local Mobile website. I’ll be presenting on the Monetizing Local Mobile panel and probably another. If you haven’t registered for the show, tickets are still available. If you’re planning on attending and you read this blog regularly, please feel free to drop me a line. It would be nice to meet some of you at the show.

I’ve been keeping busy this month with various endeavors (including vacations, wedding planning, article writing, client support and process development), but I’ll be continuing to post new content in the near future to this blog. In the meantime, here are various articles I’ve written in the past few weeks to keep you entertained and informed until the next update.

I'm officially practicing what I preach. The mobile version of this blog is here. Before the dotmobi folks get disappointed that the site is hosted at a subdomain, I should point out that the site is also accessible at BrysonMeunier.mobi. The mobile site is currently a manually coded version of the desktop site and only includes the last five posts. More information will be added at a later date. In the interim, however, it is now possible to access my thoughts on natural search and mobile SEO on the bus, in the airport, while walking down the street, in church, or wherever you can access the mobile Web.

More later on the process, and why I chose to redirect the dotmobi rather than host at the top-level domain. Thanks to Shinji Kuwayama and Kuwayama Design for helping me get this current site as close to a perfect Ready.mobi score as humanly possible.

Just a note to let my readers know that I updated my blogroll today. Since I started this Natural Search and Mobile SEO blog in May of last year, the focus has been as much on mobile search as it has been on desktop SEO, and I wanted to reflect that in the list of blogs I endorse. I also wanted to trim some of the fat, as I noticed several of the blogs on my blogroll were blogs I haven't read in months, or even, in some cases, unsubscribed from.

The result: 24 links deleted, 11 links added.

I've also updated the Mobile SEO Resources page with more great sources of information on mobile SEO.

It’s true that there’s currently very little cross-linking on the mobile Web. This is often cited by those who argue that linking is relatively unimportant in mobile SEO. However, it seems to me just the opposite conclusion should be reached from the understanding of this fact: that a user would defy convention and link to a mobile site from a mobile site is a stronger signal of quality than a link from a desktop web site. It’s clear from the mobile search engine results pages (SERPs) that desktop link popularity is a crucial ranking factor in mobile search as well. For long-term success in mobile search, a webmaster should pay attention to the overall link popularity of the site, including links from mobile sites.

Following the full explanation below are the top twenty general links I think mobile webmasters should be including in their link building strategy, and (for my friends in the Mobile SEO forum at Mobility.mobi) a link to more than 125 mobile directories to help increase a site’s general mobile link popularity.

Kudos to Open Table for building a mobile site, but in doing so I’m sorry to say that they’ve made the inaugural post of my series of posts on Mobile SEO best practices (and worst practices). This is a new feature on the blog in which I look at the best and the worst of mobile web design from an SEO perspective. In many cases (as in my coverage of JetBlue mobile’s transcoding issues) I’ll be pointing out worst practices, but I hope this will ultimately help sites increase their visibility, and ultimately help foster the growth of the mobile Web.

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.