Mobile websites – Making your site mobile friendly

Mobile search is happening.

E consultancy reported last week that Marks and Spencer launched a mobile site.

Unlike the other high street retailers who have launched apps, Marks and Spencer have put all their efforts into the mobile site. I have tried it on the iPhone and it is pretty good. I also tried it on the Samsung Tocco (not a smart phone) and it was easy to navigate and the pictures were very clear. A full review can be found at E consultancy

This news just shows you that more and more companies have mobile as part of their marketing/business strategy. Then yesterday, I read another article about mobile phones . Android phones outsold iPhones in the USA, last month for the first time. The iPhone better watch out, it is not the only smartphone out there. And for those companies that want to have a mobile strategy, do not just tailor it to the iPhone. Make sure the Android, Symbian and the Samsung handsets are involved as well. According to The Times, BlackBerry controls 63% of the market for business phones, so do not exclude these handsets either.

The trend in smartphones is expected to increase. According to Garner, sales increased by 49% to 54.3 million during Q1 2010. Overall, 314.7 million handsets were sold worldwide, with Nokia the number one supplier in both categories. Symbian was the most popular smartphone OS globally, selling 24.1 million units, with a market share of 44.3%.

RIM came second with 10.6 million sales and a 19.4% share, followed by Apple’s iPhone OS with 8.4 million sales and 15.4% share. Sales of Microsoft Windows handsets were flat at 3.7 million units, seeing its market share falling by 3.4 percentage points to 6.8%.

There is no denying it, these smartphones are here to stay, so it is vital to integrate these into your marketing strategy. Next time you are thinking of redesigning your website or adding new pages, think of making it viewable on a mobile phone.

Mobile strategy

You can longer ignore mobile as part of your marketing plan.

People didn’t think digital or online marketing would take off but look at where we are today.

Companies should start thinking about having a mobile strategy as part of their marketing plan. Of course, this may not be suitable for all, but it certainly is for retail, banks and even some B2B businesses.

1.Disney & mobile

Disney recently announced its mobile strategy . They are going to have SMS alearts and games, sweepstakes programmes and video enabled mobile website – they will have a WAP version and one for iPhone’s safari browser. Last October, they released a free, ad-supported app for iPhone and iPod touch. Their mobile site and app support all the Disney films, tv shows and video games.

They also have an expanding line-up of paid applications available in the App Store such as Toy Story Mania, Disney Fairies Fly, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Breakspin. The entertainment giant works with several mobile ad networks, including Millennial Media, AdMob, Jumptap and Nokia.

2. Search engines go mobile

Google even has its own mobile strategy, launching the first Android phone the G1 in 2008. Last November Google paid $750 million for Admob and Apple bought Quattro, Admob’s privately owned rival which owns mobile websites and applications for Apple’s iPhone and other smart phones, such as those using Google’s Android operating system.

There is potential to earn a new revenue stream. Mobile advertising has not yet completely kicked off, mainly due to the old phones that were slow and didn’t allow more than text messages. According to Strategy Analytics, smartphones now account for 15% of global mobile shipments, and that proportion is expected to rise to 45% by 2013. There is a window of opportunity here for companies to get on board early and work out their own mobile strategy or work with an agency that can help them. According to Gartner, mobile advertising revenues could be worth as much $13 billion by 2013. If a company could have just 1% of that, they would be very happy indeed.

Source: Business standard

When you do decide to go mobile, make sure your mobile strategy is part of your marketing plan and not just ad hoc as this will not work. Please do not think of your mobile strategy as building applications and then sitting still. Zara has jumped on the iPhone app bandwagon but don’t seem to have thought much about the actual application as this post from Econsultancy explains.

Mobile app or Mobile site?

As the growth of the smartphone market continues, more people are now accessing the web on their mobile phones. This has started people asking the question “Should I make my website mobile friendly? and if so,
“What does this involve?”

Mobile seo is the practice of improving a website’s visibility on the mobile phone. It is search engine optimisation on the mobile client.

There are two schools of thought how to make your site mobile seo friendly.

1. Build a mobile site
Some argue you should have a completely different mobile site with a different domain, eg .mobi instead of .com at the end. However, this can be costly and it is harder for people to remember the different URLs. It also removes the risk of creating duplicate content.
Some mobiles such as the iPhone and Blackberry Storm load images the same way as desktop pcs do and so can handle large images so some argue you do not need to have a mobile site.

Traditional SEO methods are valid for “mobile SEO” as mentioned in my previous post How do I start mobile seo There are a couple more steps to make sure the site is mobile friendly.:

* Submit the site to mobile search engines.
* Create dynamic mobile pages by combining your website’s content database with user agent detection. This will avoid the need to transcode pages on the fly as this is very complicated.
* Search results from your mobile you will see nearly the same search results as from a desktop PC. I have tried this and it was true. What does this mean? Google mobile search doesn’t list mobile sites preferentially.

2. Create a mobile app for the site
The other argument is that there are so many different smart phones in the market place and they all have a different browser experience. Therefore it is very difficult to make a mobile site to fit each of the different browsers. It would mean simply testing against all handsets, a very costly job. The solution is to make a mobile application that users can download. The developers create an app and it is handset agnostic, so every mobile phone will treat the application in the same way and the user gets the same rich experience.

Let me know what you have experienced and what you have found works best for you. Mobile seo is still new and developing so the more information about it, the better.

Mobile applications are the way forward

Microsoft and Nokia are teaming up to create an application called Microsoft Office Mobile on Nokia handsets it was announced last month. The deal will give Microsoft leverage against Google and others that are attacking its Office business with free or low-priced, Web-based productivity applications.

The companies are going to design, develop and market productivity applications for mobile professionals. They are going to work on an application called Microsoft Office Mobile and install it on Nokia’s Symbian devices. They will also do the same for other Microsoft communications, collaboration and device-management software. Even though Microsoft already had its own Windows Mobile platform they have realised that they have never really established itself in the mobile market while Nokia’s Symbian handsets is market share leader for midrange handsets.

With the launch of google docs, this venture is sure to create a cause for concern in the google offices. Google claims 1.75 million businesses use Google Apps, which is a small number compared with the amount of businesses and customers at hom using Office. According to Forrester who undertook a survey of 152 IT decision-makers, nearly 92% per cent support Office, while only a little more than 3% use Google Apps. This year, Office is forecast to generate about $20bn (£12.2bn) in revenue.

The new Microsoft app will first be available on Nokia’s Eseries phones, which are optimised for the business market and then will be extended to other Nokia handsets marketed jointly by both companies.

This alliance shows that sometimes competitors have to work together to beat the bigger rivals. By installing the Office applications on Nokia handsets, Microsoft and Nokia will be competing against Apple and Research in Motion (RIM). The iPhone as we already know has radically changed the smartphone market and the RIM Blackberry OS is very popular for business users. However, both companies will still be competitors in the mobile market. Microsoft already offers Office Mobile on Windows Mobile handsets and plans to put a new version of the application on mobile phones next year.

The first application to appear on Nokia phones will be Microsoft Office Communicator which will appear in 2010. The Communicator is the company’s instant messaging and Web presence client for business users.

Microsoft has also been working on its own apps what it calls “Office Web Apps” which includes Web-based version of Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote and will be availble on PCs when they release the next version of Office 2010. The apps will work on Safari and Firefox browsers on the Mac.

If you would like to find out more please visit the source of this post.

Mobile Cloud Computing

I know this site is also about SEO and optimising traffic to your own website, but we cannot ignore the growing mobile market and this new area called “the mobile cloud”.

According to a study conducted by ABI research, nearly all mobile money service providers will be impacted by mobile cloud computing. Cloud computing is defined as the evolution of computing processing in which processing and data storage move away from desktop and latops. In simple terms it means data storage and processing occurs outside the mobile device. Some you many have already seen is the mobile Gmail and Google Maps. Mobile cloud computing will continue to grow, ABI think it will expand rapidly over next five years, growing to 998.1 million subscribers by 2014.

Why are they so confident that this will happen? Well two reasons really:
1. There will be a rise in Platform as a Service players in the market. Otherwise known as PaaS these are are development platforms for which the development tool is hosted in the cloud and accessed through a browser. This means there is no need to install tools on developers computers to build Web applications. It can all be done on the PaaS platorm, making it cheaper and easier to develop these applications.
2. There are several standards intitiatives within the mobile industry such as the BONDI intiative and the GSM Associations’s OneAPI initiative that will help the growth of mobile cloud services. The GSM Association’s OneAPI sets the standards for network APIs which means developers can access parts of the network providers’ capabilities such as location services.

So who uses this PaaS?
A lot of companies, one of the first ones is Salesforce. They have their Force.com platform which allows business applications to be built and run in the cloud. Others are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google’s App Engine. I know you may be surprised by AWS, but this is what happens in the market place today, a company that starts by selling books over the internet, can expand into a greater and more diversified business and now AWS is used by over 500,000 developers.

Ok, when will this take effect?
It all depends on the market. Those markets that use internet more will lead the way such as Western Europe, North America and parts of Asia.

The next step is for these companies to offer the service to not just the smartphones – Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone but to the other Symbian and J2ME phones on the market. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are major players in this market.

So you may even find by end of this year, early next there will be a growth in these mobile cloud appplications and those who haven’t yet started using apps will start using them like there is no tomorrow. Who would have thought people would be using mobile phones for more than just calling?