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.

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.

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.