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January 6, 2006

2006: The Year of the Mobile

I suspect that, much like blogs were the big story of 2005, mobile search is going to fully come into its own in 2006. ClickZ has a good, short rundown on recent search engine pushes into this area, Yahoo with Yahoo! Go Mobile, and Google's deal with Motorola to ship phones with their icon pre-installed.

I've been involved in some mobile search optimization projects recently, and I can tell you that it's a bit more challenging than it might first appear. The biggest headaches are simply in the design of the web pages themselves—there's often huge variability from one mobile device to another when it comes to the way a page is displayed, and CSS support is ridiculously spotty.

That flies in the face of what you'd think would be the best approach—designing simple, standards-compliant XHTML code and using a media="handheld" stylesheet. In fact, old-school HTML with a tables-based design and no stylesheets turns out to be a heck of a lot more reliable, coupled with sending mobile surfers to a version of the page especially designed for them. It's not elegant, but it's much more likely to work the way you want it to.

After that, the actual optimization is pretty much seo 101, but with a greater focus on local search.

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