During Google Searchmasters Conference 2009, one of the presentations was about Mobile Web Design. The presentation, named “Building Mobile Friendly Websites” and held by Ankit Gupta, helped Indian webmasters understand why there is a need for mobile websites and provided guidance on how to build mobile friendly sites.
Here are some of the tips that were provided to the audience:
– Keep it simple: don’t use many internal links, minimal use cases, task oriented
– Always have a link to go back to the home page and to the previous page
– Make sure it is usable if stylesheets are disabled or not supported
– It was suggested to test your site with XHTML validators such as http://ready.mobi
Do’s and Don’t’s for a mobile XHTML website :
* Do
o Make use of accesskeys
o Resize images based on device size
o Use a good semantic structure (h1 before h2, etc)
o Make sure that the right doctype is being set
o Make sure that correct encoding is used
* Do not
o Use iframes and tables
o Use fancy form elements and multipart data
o Uploads
o Keep multiple scrolls
o Have links to unsupported doctypes
o Use pop ups
The presentation aslo talked about Mobile SEO, and explained how Google Mobile worked, that is, how it chooses which sites to include in its mobile index. Here is what was mentioned:
* Google classifies a website as mobile enabled based on certain signals like page layout, markups used, etc.
* When a user searches for “Mobile” websites only
o Only if the website is classified as Mobile websites by Google, it will show up
* When a user searches for “Everything”
o Google blends mobile websites with regular desktop websites
o Mobile websites get a boost if certain quality metrics hold
I explained in this post how Google blends mobile search results with regular web results, which you can read if you want to know more. Regarding the “quality metrics” mentioned in the last bullet above, I would have loved reading more specific details, but I would say these metrics include links and trafic.
You can watch a full video of this presentation on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05UMQjbce2o
The slides of the presentation are available here:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ddrxs4sv_0jfrfjh5r&skipauth=true