Basically, search engine optimization (SEO) for mobile pages and for desktop pages is the same. Yet, there are few things you need to pay attention to for mobile pages' SEO.
Mobile Sites
First, identify the types of mobile sites from a search engine crawler's point of view. There are two ways to build hybrid website (serving desktop users and smartphone users).
- Make web pages to fit onto the screens of different devices by using Javascript and CSS. In this case, the pages with the same URLs will display differently on different devices (such as a smartphone or desktop).
- Redirect visitors to the proper pages based on “user-agent." In this case, each page has its own unique URL.
Duplicated Content
When you build web pages by using the second method, search engines will definitely consider content for mobile devices and desktops as duplicated content, and this will result in bad search result rankings. However, there is a simple fix. All you have to do is add:
<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="URL of mobile page" />
to a desktop page, and add
<link rel="canonical" href="URL of desktop page" />
to corresponding mobile page.
Blocking
Whatever type of web page you use, you should not block search-engine robots from crawling. For example, make sure not to block googlebot-mobile from crawling desktop pages and associated elements (e.g., Javascript and CSS). Let googlebot and googlebot-mobile crawl both desktop and mobile web pages without any limitation. It is very basic stuff, but showing search engine robots everything (like desktop and smartphone pages) is one of the essential SEO methods.
© June, 2015