Mobile Internet Use and SEO
5th December 2008 by Pete Handley
A recent study by Nielsen Online into Mobile Internet growth has found that the number of people going online on their mobile phones has increased by 25% in 2008 – which is much faster than the rise in PC internet use, which has increased on 3%.
What this means is that there is now an audience of almost 7 1/2 million users on the mobile internet in the UK, and that this is the big area for growth in the future of internet access.
Whilst Google is the most popular internet site for PC users in the UK at the moment, the most popular site for mobile internet users is currently the BBC News website. At present the most popular sites for Mobile users are mainly for information, with BBC News & Weather websites popular as well as other sites like Sky Sports and Gmail featuring prominently.
Another interesting insight is that the average age of the Mobile user is much lower than a standard PC based browser. The current younger generations in the UK are used to having instant access to information when they need it, so its no surprise that
Mobile SEO is likely to become much more important in the future, when the mobile internet evolves to a stage where ecommerce sites become more heavily used, and there are more ways for these mobile searches to be monetised.
If you have a mobile site that isnt being picked up the mobile search engines at the moment, you might want to have a look at Google’s support for adding a mobile site to Google.
One of the first steps that they advise is to have a Mobile Sitemap to let them know that these pages are meant for mobile users, but there are many other tips that are given, such as following the w3c’s Mobile Web Best Practices.
Some of m