How to optimize your blog for mobile devices

According to Comscore, the number of people accessing the web through their mobile phones has doubled over the last year to 22 million every day. Social networking sites and blogging are the most popular sites people are visiting on their hand held device.

If you want to make sure that you are getting as many visitors as you can, make sure you optimize your blog to make it mobile search engine friendly. WordPress search engine optimization for the mobile client means making sure a business is as visible as possible on the mobile web and therefore helping that website get as much traffic as possible from search engines. There are two options:

Build your blog from scratch to be mobile friendly

If you are good at building websites, build a blog bearing in mind the following:

Screen size

This is a lot smaller on handsets than on a laptop and many WAP browsers strip out the style sheet (CSS) making the page display as text. This is not aesthetically pleasing. So what you need to do is make sure you have a mobile version of your website that doesn’t contain images and maximizes the functionality of your site.

Valid code

Keep the code on your website clean as mobile search engines are unable to digest invalid code.

W3C Mobile Web Initiative

Adhere to best practices, look at W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. This will ensure that your content is accessible to anyone regardless of their platform — including mobile users and mobile search engines.

Follow traditional on-site SEO best practices

Write short, concise blog headlines as these will be what the mobile visitor sees and will attract them to click on the title.

Make sure the URL structure is as simple as possible. This means that it is also easier for your visitors to type in the address.

Use an off the shelf CMS – WordPress

Alternatively, if you do not want to build your own site and are already using WordPress, you can install WordPress Mobile Pack plugin. Go to your plugins section and search for the Mobile Pack as below and follow the steps.

Type in the plugin you want to search for

mobile blogging

Choose and click install now

Wordpress mobile blog

Your plugin should automatically install which would allow you to activate it

Mobile blog plugin

I downloaded this plugin and it worked straight away. It was better than the MobilePress plugin which only displayed the title of the blog posts. I am not a patient developer and so this plugin was the best choice for me.

Is your blog mobile ready?

With more and more people expecting to access the Internet through their handheld devices, it is very important that our blogs are ready for it. If you have used any other mobile WordPress plugins which you have found useful, please feel free to comment.

A guest post by Jo Turnbull of www.seojoblogs.com. If you want to guest post on HowToMakeMyBlog, please check out more info here.