SEO for your WAP Sites

Written on 10/19/2008 04:54:00 PM by poison_ivy

If you still don’t have a WAP version of your website, then you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities especially if your website isn’t mobile friendly (i.e, has a lot of javascripts and flash, AJAX, PHP scripts, etc.). If you already hired an SEO expert, consider asking them to do some optimization for your WAP sites.

Contrary to what you may think, if your website is visible to search engines when you’re using a PC, it might not be the same when you’re searching using your mobile phone. Google and Yahoo both have a mobile version of their websites and you can be sure that they’ve optimized their algorithms to ensure that mobile sites are shown first before ordinary websites.

On the other hand, if you’re only a regular blogger like myself but savvy enough to build a mobile version of your blog, you might want to do a bit of tweaking to ensure that your blog has search engine visibility. Some SEO experts suggest using a link rel microformat so that search engines can identify the mobile version of the website:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" media="handheld" href="http://example.mobi/" title="Mobile/PDA">

You might also try using a mobile sitemap as suggested by Google. If you’re still weighing the pros and cons of optimizing your website for mobile phones just think of the numbers; according to the head of United Nations International telecommunications Union, mobile phone subscribers worldwide will hit FOUR BILLION by the end of 2008. Now THAT’s a lot of lost sales/customers/readers.

*links in italics are sponsored links.