The Ever Expanding Mobile Market and How to Become the Best in the Mobile Game
Posted by on July 16th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Social Media |
The mobile and local search markets have seen immense growth at rates never seen before over the last three years. Yet still, they are on the verge of taking off to a higher level with huge growth forecasts for the mobile industry just released recently. All indications point that we are still on the early development stage of mobile development, in spite of the massive number of new mobile technologies being offered from left to right today. Industry analysts tell us to brace ourselves to the mobile boom that has begun.
According to the investment firm Morgan Stanley the mobile Internet has grown significantly faster than its desktop equivalent. The Mobile Internet Report predicts that more people will choose to access the Internet through their smartphones than their desktops at home, as mobile Internet usage will still continue to grow over the next five years. It suggests that we are in the “early innings of mobile Internet development” at the moment. This development is happening at rates faster than earlier tech advancements, such as the progress of the desktop PC era. A lot of people quickly adapted to smartphones, including the Apple iPhone and other mobile devices powered by Google’s Android mobile OS.
Another research firm, Research & Markets (R&M), observed that in the United States alone, the mobile market is growing rapidly with more than fifty percent of all mobile devices expected to be categorized as smartphones by 2011. These devices have transformed into mobile PCs, where users can experience a wide range of services. Smartphones are now built with more powerful hardware such as expanded memory and fast processors and better features like video, music, Internet and a lot more mobile apps –– all of which are becoming a standard.
According from Ovum, an independent telecoms analyst, indicators have shown that there has been an increasing dependence towards mobile markets, with the mobile landscape becoming more saturated every year. For instance, forecasts show that Google Android, a major player in the smartphone market, will widen its market share from 5% to 18% in the next five years. Moreover, the mobile app market has shown impressive growth rates over the recent years. It will continue to grow across the world at a staggering rate of 41% every year for the next five years, with Apple leading the way in mobile app downloads.
Mobile Search
With these developments in mind, it is safe to say the online search companies will also compete amongst themselves for the best mobile search experience. Mobile net growth is a worldwide phenomenon, and one of the tech trends that would surely converge to spur this growth is mobile search. With the whole world at its disposal, local search companies are taking initiatives to refine search engine experience by testing what kind of search results mobile users will look for and which sites are the most mobile-compatible. Most mobile users prefer sites that are very simple, easy to navigate, and fast loading.
Mobile Friendly Sites
Right now, having a mobile site will not be much significant to outrank big companies for keywords. But we can expect that having a mobile friendly site will develop into a crucial factor to become easily visible in search engines done from mobile devices in the coming years, enough to beat the competition.
To create a mobile friendly version of your website, you must give it a unique domain name first to give it a “mobile identity.” There are a lot of ways to do it, like using a m.domain.com format, or creating a subdirectory for the mobile version (www.domain.com/m/). There are also others that use a mobile.domain.com format, and a few ones use more unique URLs. You have the freedom to choose the way a mobile URL is written. However, remember that mobile users have to deal with smaller devices that are sometimes difficult to type in, thus a short and simple mobile URL is always good.
Dealing with Duplicate Content Issues
Having a mobile site can pose issues with regards to duplicate content, that is, having your primary site and its mobile version use the same content. If you are familiar with SEO, remember how having duplicate content can cause issues and penalties from search engines that cannot figure out the two versions are unique from one another and do not really share the same content? Creating a mobile-specific domain for your site, as discussed above, does not entirely eliminate duplicate content. To avoid duplicate content issues, you have to include a mobile server header in your server (like this one: application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml) so your mobile site sends a signal to search engines like Google telling it that it’s indexing mobile content. Another way is to create a mobile site map, such as this one:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:mobile=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0″>
<url>
<loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
</urlset>
The key to avoid duplicate content is to create a canonical tag to point the preferred URL you want to get indexed if you do have a lot of URLs sharing the same content and same content type header.
Using Redirects
To make further distinction between your primary site and your mobile site, you have to redirect users to the right destination, i.e. redirect mobile users to your mobile domain. To do this, you have to run a script in your mobile site that detects mobile users. The script should use a USER_AGENT detection to see if the site is being access through a mobile device. Lastly, you have to establish a 301 redirect that leads a mobile user to your mobile site properly.
An alternative to this, especially if you can’t run the script, is to create a standard link in your primary site that leads to the mobile version. When users access your site, they can just click on it, just make sure that the link is largely visible and preferably on top of your page.
Another approach would be to use a single domain for both desktop and mobile versions by using CSS that will restructure your site to suit the device people use to access the site. You can use WordPress for this; it has a WpTouch plug-in that recognizes mobile devices automatically and restructures your site template accordingly. You can also do this without WordPress by using a dynamically generated CSS page in your page header that looks like this one:
<noscript>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”handheld.css” media=”handheld”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”desktop.css” media=”screen”>
</noscript>
<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>
if(screen.height > 320) {
document.write(‘<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”desktop.css” media=”Screen” />’);
} else {
document.write(‘<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”handheld.css” />’);
}
</script>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”iphone.css” media=”only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print”>
<!–[if IE 6]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”ie6.css” type=”text/css”>
<![endif]–>
The World at our Fingertips
As we witness the dawn of the mobile age, people have increasingly involved their lives through their mobile devices. More and more people buy smartphones that now act as a passport to the whole world. These small devices allow us to connect to the world, from anywhere, anytime. As smartphones become increasingly affordable and more apps are downloaded for consumption, we can expect the mobile boom to create a greater impact as the years pass. This is the best time to take the opportunity of bringing your presence and business to the mobile world. Stay alert with the changing online market, tap your mobile web potential and act swiftly. If you get ahead of the competition, you will be successful in no time.
