A Bunch Of Ways To Get People to your Mobile Site Mike Rowehl MobileCampNYC - May 2007 - search engine optimization, they drive a ton of traffic - folks like Paul Smith at WapTags and Russ Beattie with mobitopia.com were able to bootstrap themselves into pretty decent chunks of traffic based mostly off capturing search well - mobile sitemap - theres plenty of stuff out there that will help you make a sitemap either from existing content (like the python tool that google provides) or that ties into a publishing tool like wordpress (anyone formalized this, the stuff I did was pretty nasty) - cross linking - no, its not a bad word, its just used for evil frequently. Deep linking behavior doesnt really exist on the mobile web yet, its weird. For some reason that part of HTML base behavior didnt come over with the technologies, which is too bad. It turns out to be a great way to let adhoc groups kinda collaborate on building an information space. I think something might need to jumpstart it on mobile, it might do everyone some good (well, almost everyone} - either link exchange programs or GASP! just talk to the people running sites that you like. Some of the folks working in mobile really kick ass and would be willing to cooperate. Find them. - dir.mobi, mobitopia.com, waptags.com, taptap.net, tappity.com, yeswap, and other mobile focused portals. There are lots of junky ones out there and a few good ones. From what Ive seen so far they dont really drive tremendous traffic yet, but as the mobile web grows I theyre going to become the central points instead of the carrier decks, the same way that online the traffic moved from ISP walled gardens to public resources - google webmaster tools - I thought everyone knew about the claim your site tools that Google has, but I still run into people who for some reason its slipped by. Once you put a marker file up on your site to tell Google that yes you really control it, you have visibility into all sorts of interesting things that Google thinks it knows about your site. Do the other search engines have something of the sort - return only xhtml to bots - Ive heard this from a few people, and its normally what I do with my sites now. No matter what you normally serve up make sure that Googlebot and Slurp and others only see the xhtml-mp version of your site. Most of us dont really understand how the indexes work internally, theyre just not transparent. The expectation is that making the bots see only xhtml-mp will keep them from getting confused about if your site is mobile or desktop oriented. - link the pc version to your mobile version (media=handheld) - thanks to Dave Harper and Scott Rafer for beating up on Google to get something consistently workable. Just like you can link to an alternate form of RSS from your pages you can also link to an alternate form of mobile to tell google about your mobile version. Ive actually seen this in particular make a tremendous difference in terms of ranking. - markup validators - its not possible frequently to make something that makes all of them happy, but the closer you are to expected markup generally the better you can expect the crawlers to be able to understand your pages - which ones - W3C mobile validator - dotMobi Ready Report - they will conflict with each other. Deal or propose a solution - user generated content - its not just for web 2.0 any more - and its not just a buzzword, nor does it mean duping some schmucks into creating your site for you, as some skeptics put it. Allowing people to communicate with and through their own creations is a delicate and subtle practice. - check out Ajits writings on OpenGardens, he frequently does a great job of pulling some points out of relatively nebulous topics. - keep in mind the 80-20 rule of lurkers to posters online. I personally believe its even more distinct on mobile, maybe about 10-90, but that could be because my ID skillz are not on par with the industry leaders. Its a difficult issue getting people to naturally interact through their mobile. It will be a fantastic medium, but really we re just learning about how to do it. See Brian Fling, Barbara Ballard, and Kelly Goto for frequently excellent writings about how to design for the mobile experience - and finally, indexing of UGC is generally fantastic when it comes to SEO. Search engines love the kind of context that tends to foster users to create, so it becomes a beautifully structured feedback loop if you can get it going - analytics and metrics - unfortunately something thats not very well serviced in the mobile industry as a whole. You cant use Google Analytics as far as I know. Do any of the others... - packages that work off of inspecting apache log files are normally what I go with. Ive been using awstats on you own sites to track pageviews and search results. Things to keep in mind: - awstats wants to try to identify visitors by unique IP and UA over some period of time. Because carriers tend to have all very similar devices coming through a relatively small set of IPs, it does horrible with visitor count. Just ignore that number. - awstats can be a bit piggy with respect to memory and CPU, If youre going to be checking the reports over and over throughout the day just run the static report generator from cron. - at one point awstats was responsible for a large number of breakins, like any software make sure you pay attention to the security implications - there is some great mobile specific info that could be used to help out, unfortunately it doesnt normally make it into logs. MSISDN is actually passed in quite a few cases, even through its passed in as many different forms and locations as there are carriers. Sure would be nice if someone engaged in some hackery to get awstats to grok mobile a bit more..... someone. - WML, yes, it still exists - The normal response to that is Sure, but only on phones I dont care about and in places I dont want to support. Not quite though. Even today Boost (a US MVNO) is shipping a vast majority of its devices with no XHTML support. I think nextel does the same. WML is alive even in the US, even if it is in subsections of the US market. - This really comes down to a point of what youre trying to do with your site. If you think its necessary to spread your site as fluid from one user to another, the potential stumbling block of having some portion of users out there who cant access your service and interact is pretty detrimental. However that percentage is definitely in the minority when it comes to active mobile web users, and the percentage is getting smaller every day from what I understand. - getting a presence on the users phone - on some handsets its a real pain in the ass, or even impossible for a user to bookmark your site so that they can get back. There are a few workarounds. They tend to be expensive, complex, and barroque. But given the choice of losing a user or having to do some contortions, it might be worth it. - sending the user an SMS message with a link to your site. Most phones are making link clicking simpler, though certainly not all, and certainly for significantly different values of simple. It can be expensive to do, but with services like TextMarks, 4Info and Mozes its much more doable than it used to be. - creating a Java launcher. Yep, it might actually be easier to make a tiny Java application that just launches the browser to your site than it is to get a user to bookmark your site themselves. Im not even going to comment on the implications for mobile web usability this might have, but I certainly dont consider it a happy situation. - make sure your site actually works on devices - its expensive and difficult to get real access to all the devices in the world, its very resource intensive even for just a single market. Expecially if it happens to not be the market you currently reside in. - services like DeviceAnywhere now offers a boutique version of what used to be pretty much a carrier only service (MobileComplete), expensive still but not as expensive as flying to South Africa every few weeks to retest. - Forum Nokia provides the same kind of access, but I assume to devices in their lineup only, for free from what I understand. Anyone tried it - build your site within a community that includes tools to grow - Sites like Winksite include ways to introduce new users to your site through searches and recomendations, essentially taking care of what would be considered a link exchange program if the sites were located under different umbrellas. Its an extremely powerful way to grow traffic, affiliate programs are huge and sites that can do the same will probably be just as huge (take this with a grain of salt, Im biased having come from Ning and being a strong believer in the model) - theres been anecdotal mention that storing your content in Google base might help out pretty significantly in terms of your overall search ranking - where can I get more help - Your local Mobile Monday chapter of course! - the wmlprogrammer Yahoo group that Luca from WURFL fame has been running - Russ has a community based on Ning setup at mowser.com - we have forums setup at admob (forum.admob.com)