Should I Have a Separate Mobile Website?

Meryl HeindenreichAccount Manager

First Decision

1. To have a separate mobile site 2. Make your desktop website compatible with mobile devices.

• If you choose 1, you have to decide if your site will show something different to each user depending on their device (dynamically serving different HTML and CSS (styling) based on whether the user-agent is a mobile device or desktop PC

• If you choose 2, your site will show the same thing (same HTML) to mobile and desktop visitors, with only the CSS changing depending on the device to ensure the page renders for optimal viewing

Google Recommendation

• 22% of all Google searches currently being made on mobile devices, and mobile search set to exceed desktop search by 2015

• Google released their official recommendation for building Smartphone-optimized websites: Responsive web design

Option 3: A responsive website design is the third configuration, where the server sends the same HTML to every user, and CSS is used to change how the page is displayed to a device using media queries

Why Responsive Web Design

Google is recommending responsive web designs for several reasons:

1. Having one URL for a piece of content (instead of a separate URL for the mobile and desktop versions) makes it easier for your visitors to interact with your content (commenting on it, sharing it, linking to it, etc).

2. Having one URL for a piece of content removes all issues of duplicate content, or other points of confusion for search algorithms to determine how to index your content.

3. No redirects will be necessary to get visitors to the right version of content for their device, thus reducing load-speed, and the likelihood of errors – which is good for SEO and for user-experience.

4. Googlebot can crawl and index content more efficiently with a responsive design – resulting in more of your content being indexed and being kept up to date for search results.

For help with the creation of your mobile-optimized website, visit www.BayshoreSolutions.com.

Additional information: http://www.howtogomo.com/ https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details