The Explosion of the Mobile Web…..Is Your Website Ready?
Just a few short years ago, it was a good bet that you would read articles like this one on your PC or laptop. Today, it’s just as likely that you are reading this article on a smartphone or tablet computer. So what’s changed, what happened? The mobile web happened, that’s what – and the Internet will never be the same. So, what’s the mobile web?
Loosely defined, the mobile web is a way of accessing the Internet via a wireless network, using a handheld mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer.
The Explosion Of The Mobile Web
The mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace, and is forecast to overtake the desktop web in 2014. In other words, more users will access the Internet using a mobile phone rather than a PC for the first time.
Approximately 900 million people currently access the web with mobile phones, compared to 1.4 billion desktop Internet users. In 2014, mobile web users will outpace desktop users (approximately 1.7 billion mobile users to approximately 1.65 billion desktop users). By 2015, the number of mobile web users is expected to increase to 2 billion.
Assuming an annual growth rate of about 2 percent annually between 2010 and 2015 in cell phone subscriptions (77 percent of the world’s population will have cell phone subscriptions in 2010 and 87 percent will have subscriptions in 2015), about 6.35 billion people worldwide will have a mobile phone subscription and approximately 1 out of 3 subscribers (or 2 billion out of 6.35 billion) will be accessing the Internet on mobile phones. (Source: Wikimedia)
And according to the August, 2011 edition of eMarketer, 33 percent of mobile users are looking to access local content relevant to their GPS positioned location.
Is Your Website Ready?
So, what does all of this mean to you? It means more people than ever will be viewing your website through a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer, via a wireless network. It also means that if you want to survive and thrive, you have to adjust and adapt, and make your website mobile web friendly. The good news is, it’s easier than you think.
“Within the Alexa top 1,000 sites, 40.1 percent of all sites are mobile-friendly. These sites represent the world’s most popular web properties, like Google, Facebook and Yahoo!
Beyond the top 1,000, mobile friendliness still holds strong but is not yet as widespread. Of the top 10,000 Alexa sites, 29.7 percent perform well on mobiles. Once the input data is broadened to include the top 500,000 sites, the total number of mobile-friendly sites drops to 19.3 percent.” (Source: mobiThinking.com)
If you haven’t already done so, the very first thing you need to do is bring your website up to speed visually. In other words, you want to make sure that users of mobile devices can view your site optimally.
The quickest and easiest way to do this is to run your site through the MobiReady online testing site. This is a free service that evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards.
The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device. There are also other tools that will allow you to test your site for mobile readiness. In fact, here are 10 Excellent Tools for Testing Your Site on Mobile Devices.
Personally, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of these types of testing tools. For example, I ran my site through MobiReady, and it gave my site a 2 out of 5 score which, according to their analysis is bad. I got the exact same score before and after I mobil-optimized my site.
Here’s the problem: I’ve had many friends and colleagues of mine, all with different makes and models of smartphones, on a variety of platforms, tell me that my site looks just fine on their phones. So while testing tools may be a useful resource, the true litmus test is what users of mobile devices are seeing – so be sure to ask them.
That being said, there ARE things you can do to mobile-optimize your website.
How To Make Your Website Mobile Compatible 1. Have a fast-loading site. Chances are, most mobile-web users who are using their phones to access the Internet are using a slower 3G connection. You can help these users out by making sure your website code is clean, which will not only make for a faster-loading site, but faster downloads as well.
2. Don’t use flash. Not all mobile devices can see flash? Personally, I’m not a huge fan of flash sites anyway. But if you absolutely, positively have to have a flash site, be both smart and considerate. Make sure you have an alternate HTML version of your site as well.
3. Have a clean, easy to navigate website. Remember, mobile users are viewing your site on a tiny little screen. In addition, there is no mouse and not all mobile devices are equipped with a touch screen. So don’t make it harder for mobile users to view or utilize your site than it needs to be. Clean up the clutter and streamline your content. Simplify, simplify, simplify. If you keep it simple, your site will be user-friendly for everyone.
4. Use HTML phone numbers. Don’t make mobile users have to type in your phone number. Use HTML so that they can simply click to dial the number.
5. Avoid horizontal scrolling. Mobile users prefer to scroll vertically as opposed to horizontally. It’s easier and less of a hassle for them. Always create your content as a single column of text that wraps for mobile users.
6. Use images sparingly. As I mentioned earlier, most mobile users are using a slower 3G connection. As a result, heavier images can take forever to load. To avoid this problem, you should use images sparingly on your website. But if you do choose to use images, they should be lighter-weight jpeg, gif or png format. Also, make sure to compress your images to avoid zooming.
7. Voice Search. Google’s Voice Search on smartphones, has increased voice search usage by approximately 600% in the past year. Since mobile devices don’t have a traditional keyboard like a PC or laptop, voice search makes searching quicker and easier for smartphone users. So you should definitely keep an eye on this trend for SEO purposes. Bear in mind, people tend to search differently when speaking as opposed to typing. For example, while you might type-search “best virtual assistants,” you might voice-search “what are the best virtual assistant services?” Again, it’s a trend you should keep an eye on.
Indexing Of A Mobile Site
Google mainly recommends the following for better indexing of a mobile site.
• Google has a separate mobile bot for indexing mobile friendly pages. So, always redirect this bot (check for user agent ‘Googlebot-Mobile’) to the mobile version of your site. This bot should not see the normal site.
•Use the XHTML Mobile doctype so that search engine bots can clearly identify the page as mobile friendly.
•For each page, there should be a link for the standard view of that page. It will help Google to categorize mobile pages and its corresponding standard pages. (Source: The Right Way to Build a Mobile Site)
By David Jackson
Want To Sell Your Website? – Making Your Website More Valuable
Most of us do not start up a website with the thought of selling it one day – we usually start up a website with the thought of making that site popular, useful, and/or profitable. But inevitably, for anyone who has been in the online business world for any significant period of time, the thought enters our heads about whether or not we should sell our business.
There are a lot of articles on the Internet that concern how much a web business is worth. It is a topic that we may address some day in the future, but for the purposes of this article, I want to focus on factors that can help increase the value of your web based business.
One important note before we start: these tips are geared towards businesses whose value would be more than a few thousand dollars. This is not geared toward the “Flippa” crowd, but rather to more established online businesses.
With that, below are a few tips on increasing the value of your website.
Financial Records
The lifeblood of any online business acquisition is a business’s financials. If any experienced buyer approaches you, or if you solicit your site for sale to an experienced buyer, one of the very first things that a buyer will request are financial statements.
The reason for this is simple: buyers want to know how much they can reasonably invest in acquiring your business. Whether you are selling Youtube.com or MaAndPopShop.com, a buyer is constantly gauging the relative risk of their investment. Financial statements are simply the easiest way to get a starting point as to where a business can be financially.
Many people will read the above statements and think “but my business is much more than just the financials”. This is most likely true – every business has a host of intangibles that are mixed together to create an appealing business that works well. These intangibles do work together to build value in your business, but in the end, buyers are looking to gauge the riskiness of their investments, and financial statements help them do so.
But it goes a step further – whereas financial statements help a buyer gauge the riskiness of a particular acquisition, detailed and accurate financial statements that are easily verifiable help a buyer put to rest certain perceptions of risk. The point here is often lost on many people considering selling their businesses: detailed, verifiable, and clean financials can help you sell your online business faster and for more money.
Recommendations – If you think you may be selling your business in the near future do what you can to get your finances in order. This would include either hiring a book keeper or buying a version of Quickbooks and learning how to use it. Be sure to separate your business activities from personal expenses and income as well as other business activities. If you are able to, setup a dedicated business entity for the business you wish to sell – businesses that can be verified with tax returns are absolute gold to prospective buyers as it opens up the possibility for them to get a loan to buy your business.
Paint Yourself Out of the Picture
Nobody wants to buy themselves a job. Buying an Internet business comes with a set of risks that buyer’s are very familiar with. In essence, an Internet based business is an assetless business – the only asset tends to be “goodwill” and possibly some inventory (goodwill is a general accounting term used to describe a business’s reputation, relationships, and other intangibles). The problem with goodwill acquisitions is that they can quickly lose their value. If one were buying a restaurant instead of an Internet business, and the restaurant had to close, that person would still have the value of furniture, fixtures, equipment, and real estate to fall back upon.
In light of these risks, buyers find Internet businesses appealing for the same reasons you and I find them appealing: you can run a very profitable operation without having to manage a full store. Often times, you can run a great operation and work just part time.
Keep this in mind when preparing your business to sell: the more you paint yourself out of the picture and allow the business to be run without the owner being an “owner/operator”, the more buyers you will ultimately be able to appeal to.
Recommendations: Write out a current “day and week in the life of” describing your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks with the business. What can be done by someone else? What needs to be done by yourself? Try to get your hourly workload to no more than 10-15 hours per week and outsource what you can outsource. In addition, don’t wrap up your business in a special talent that you personally have (e.g. web design, seo, special writing style, etc).
Look for Single Points of Failure
Keeping in mind the previous section’s discussion on buyers looking to assess risk and the nature of how quickly an Internet business can lose value, it is important to identify single points of failure for your business. A single point of failure is any part of your business that you rely on that cannot be replaced by something else. Below are a few examples:
- You currently rely on just one vendor for all of your products
- You are a web design agency who has one very talented web designer that does most of your work
- You have a handful of clients who make up a disproportionate amount of your revenue base
- Your only source of traffic is from your top Google rankings
That last point is one that may surprise some website owners. It used to be the case that a top Google ranking was something that would add significant value. However, with the impact of the Panda updates and previously the Florida updates, buyers simply don’t trust rankings to be permanent. It is far better to show that the business is well balanced in all regards. Should one key aspect of the business falter, you need to demonstrate that while it may affect the business, even significantly, it would not kill the business because there is a backup plan.
Recommendation: Identify single points of failure and build a backup plan. If you currently rely too heavily on one or two vendors, reach out to other vendors and find out what it would take to start up with them. If you only have Google rankings driving traffic, startup a PPC campaign so you know what the cost structure would be. Startup a newsletter, build your social media presence, and the like.
Selling an online business can be a fun, yet intimidating process. By planning properly, sellers can often add thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to their overall value.
Author: Mark Daoust owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, Inc.
8 Things Bing Won’t Tell You
Every major search engine provides hints and tips about how to optimize your pages for improved rankings on their sites. But when you read these guidelines you quickly see that most of it is just their own wish list. Things like ‘Write for humans not search engine bots – or – do not hide keywords with a font matching the background color.’ It is all good advice but kind of general and already well known (for the past decade.)
But there are always things a search engine will not tell you. And, of course, these are the things that make all the difference in your SEO efforts and results. That said; here are eight things that Bing does not want you to know (or you can skip to the Magic Formula section at the end):
[Stop Waiting for Website Traffic]
1.) Your Domain Name Matters – A Lot
Search for just about anything on MSN / Bing and at least three of the top five matches will have some version of that keyword as the domain name. For example if you wanted to optimize for the keyword ‘my domain’ you should try to get the domain name ‘mydomain.com.’ If that is taken, opt for ‘my-domain.com.’ If that’s taken try for a name starting with ‘mydomain’ and ending with a word that is commonly associated. This is called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. A good example would be ‘mydomainname.com’ or ‘my-domain-name.com.’ BTW, Bing treats dashes as a space so as long as long as the dashes merely separate words, they are treated much like the non dash version.
2.) There is No Sandbox
Here’s some great news for anyone just getting started. Bing does not seem to care about the age of your domain name. There is no ‘sandbox’ like Google has. Many people, myself included, have registered brand new domains and had them ranking in a matter of days.
3.) DotCom Trumps DotNet
Today some search engines like Google will often give .net and .com virtually the same value, and possibly higher value for a .org that is for a recognized non-profit organization. Bing however appears to prefer the .com version. You can even see instances where a ‘.co.uk’ site gets high rankings simply because it uses the exact keyword in the domain name and .co is close enough to .com.
4.) We Like Sub Domains
Most web hosts will let you add sub domains to your website. On Bing, if you have the sub domain mydomain.mydomain.com you are in for some potentially great rankings. The same is true if you have my.domain.com, but to a slightly lesser degree.
5.) Less is More – Part One
We have been trained by Google to try to have hundreds of pages of quality content on every website. Bing adheres to the old policy that they are indexing web ‘pages’ not web ‘sites’ (like Google says they do, but Bing appears to really mean it.) This means each page is treated on its own merit so a site with one page has the same chances of being ranked as a site with 100 pages, because each page is genuinely treated individually.
6.) Less is More – Part Two
The same rule as above goes for on-page text. Pages with 800 to 1,200 words seem to do best on Google but on Bing the reverse is true, with 250 to 500 words being the magic number. Just do not overuse your keyword.
7.) Links are Nice But Not Required
Forget about spending your life building an ever growing number of inbound links for Bing. They do not need them. Your site, for now at least, is judged by its own merits, page by page.
8.) Be Bold not Strong
The original SEO method dating back to 1996 was using the H1 or ‘strong’ heading tags in your HTML. Forget them for now. Bing gives higher priority to how you would express importance in a word processor document; larger font and bold text as the main markers.
Here’s my magic formula for a one hour top ranking:
A.) Get the .com version of a three to four word keyword as the domain name (dashes are fine.)
B.) Use the domain name as the page heading in a bolded font, slightly larger than the paragraph text.
C.) Write 400 words of natural sounding text using the keyword up to five times.
D.) Mention the keyword once in the first sentence and once in the final sentence of the page – then up to three times scattered throughout the remainder.
E.) Bold one instance of the keyword. Italicize one instance of the keyword. Use one instance of the keyword as a link back to the same page.
F.) Always fill in your Title, Description and Keywords META tags. That’s it.
Author Mike Small
