Should I optimize my web site for mobile devises?
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By Jennifer Manocchio
There are 42.7 million smart phone users in the United States and 98 percent of them are accessing their favorite web site on their mobile phone according to Information Week. Based on these statistics, developing a web site that is viewable on mobile devises is a good investment if your target audience – consumer or business-to-business – is using smart phones.
Accomplishing the task of creating a mobile site is not as complicated as it sounds. If you have an internal IT department or dedicated web site developer, you can discuss with him or her about creating a sub-domain or a .mobi. A sub-domain or .mobi will be the best option if you want to create a custom mobile site.
A sub-domain is fairly easy to implement and can be added to your current content management system. Or you can develop a .mobi, which is developed specifically for a mobile platform. According to dotMobi, search engine optimization is a key benefit of using a .mobil domain.
“Every .mobi domain registered gets its own entry in the Internet Zone File — the files that search engines use to start their crawls — your site will automatically perform better than any other naming convention. Additionally, search engines detect when searches are being made from mobile devices and prioritize their results accordingly. Because .mobi sites are high quality and made for mobile, they are automatically brought to the top of the mobile search results.”
If you are not familiar with code or simply want to make your current site mobile friendly, a second option is to use a third-party code translator. There are a number of free and paid sites that allow you to simply copy and paste content from your current site into a mobile version. Following are a few options: MoFuse, Mippin, Mobilize by Mippin and Wirenode.
You can always opt to develop your mobile site using a third-party translator and monitor your web site analytics to see if your web traffic using mobile devises increases. If so, you can always take the next step to develop a custom mobile web site.
Looking to create a mobile version of your site and not sure where to start? Contact me at jennifer at sweeneypr.com or 910.772.1688.
