Google recently announced yet another change to the way they rank your web pages. If you are a small business owner and have a website, you probably know the importance of showing up in search engine results. As the industry has changed, more and more people are browsing the internet with their smart phones. Yet, when we think about optimizing our websites for search engines, most of us put all of our attention on the “desktop” version of our sites (i.e. the traditional way we visit websites through our PCs).
Google will soon force everyone to pay more attention to how users experience their web content via smartphones. If that experience is bad (based on Google’s definition on best practices), your search-engine results may be negatively impacted. View the complete announcement here.
Here is an overview of some of the issues that Google is targeting:
- If you visited your website with your smartphone right now, can you view any videos that might be on your site? If not, you might have a problem. Many websites require Adobe Flash in order to watch videos. While this is common on desktop versions of websites, many smartphones are not equipped to view these. Google will start penalizing mobile websites that don’t play videos through HTML5 tags.
- When navigating your website with your smartphone, do all links take you to the content you’re looking for? If some of your links don’t (for example, the link takes you to a 404 error page, or to the wrong content), Google will start penalizing you.
- How fast does your website render on your smartphone? Because many smartphones have slower internet connections than most desktop users, making sure your site loads quickly on a smartphone is extremely important. This is a significant factor Google will consider when ranking your mobile website.
Other than the above items, there are several configuration and backend items that you’ll want to be sure that your webmaster or web developer takes a look at. WordPress customers may want to update to the latest versions of software, theme files and make sure they are running on a Linex server. If your site is more than 2 years old, or you don’t have a web master that can help you look at the above items, please contact us at 877-924-1414.
Guest Posting
