Mobile SEO

Mobile SEO and Mobile Advertising with Winksite

Winksite is a mobile Internet site online creator. In a number of minutes, users can create, optimise add advertising to and launch their own mobile site space.

At first, I thought Winksite was nothing new. Mobisitegalore, Zinadoo, Wapple all offer this service and I have successfully managed and created mobile sites with all of them.

When, I accessed Winksite I expected a similar interface to the other site makers. I didn't get it. What I got was a rich mobile site creation tool that made me create not one but two mobile site in a matter of minutes.

They can be found here: http://winksite.mobi/benar/gomo and http://winksite.mobi/benar/mobileseo

For the first site (gomo) I just used standard Winksite features. I changed the background and added a picture to the Mobile SEO site. This occurred with great ease and simplicity.

Then I found some features; which surprised me. There was a Mobile SEO button AND a Mobile Advertising button. I immediately thought, this must be how Winksite makes its money. By either pimping the mobile sites with its own adverts and generating revenue.

But I was wrong. To my surprise there was a note saying, "100% your revenue". Well, I nearly fell off my chair. This is the first example I have seen of this from from a free mobile site creator be it www.getmobile.com or www.zinadoo.com

So I checked it out.  The screen grab below shows how easy it is. You can CHOOSE self-service from Winkiste or add your ID for several mobile advertisers. This was the most impressive choice of global mobile advertising companies that I had seen in one place. Buzz City was already on there - which I thought was great for the company as it is fighting very hard to become a leader not a newbie in the US market.

Then the actual interface for mobile advert placement is even simpler. I am about to set this up with mkhoj, admob etc. But first I am going to get a Buzzcity account as I have been eager to test these services outside of the mygamma marketplace. The examples of the ID from each provider is a must. This simplifies life for the heavy mobile campaign users.

On several occasions when I implement three different campaigns on the same day - I always spend ages double checking the ad-codes for the companies. Seeing what the code should look like makes a huge difference and makes sure that silly mistakes aren't made.  (More from this and screen shots when all the adverts are in place).

The advertising looked good - so then I decided to look for some Mobile SEO tools. This was slightly harder to find, but is available in the Edit page section. I was eager to see how Winksite managed SEO services. I realised that mobile site map creation was automatic - which is great. The use interface is also a no brainer. See below:

What we think?

I have to say, I am impressed. I will be using this a lot more often and the more advertisers included the better. Stay tuned as I will be purchasing a new dotmobi domain to transfer this one to and lets see if there are any transcoding problems or issues this time and I will also follow up on the successful integration and revenue generation from the mobile advertising campaigns.

Ready.mobi score for gomonews.mobi increases after mobile seo

So, I started to optimise gomonews.mobi after comments from find.mobi and Wapple. The results have started to kick in after 24 hours.

I did some major changes yesterday and today my ready.mobi score has increase to 4. I haven't added a mobile sitemap haven't finished tweaking the site yet.

Mobile Seo News RSS

New RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MobileSeo

What is Mobile Seo?

Last week at MEM08, I started to talk about my very small Mobile Seo business. A lot of people said, I didn’t know you were an online SEO – how to do you do it?

Others said what is SEO and in the same breath – can you get me to the top of Google?

So, unlike many SEO’s out there that have entered mobile from online – I am in a very unique position. I am a self taught online SEO. But, with nearly 15 years of experience in mobile and four years in the mobile search business – my positioning and mobile seo services come with a twist.

For me, I try to optimise mobile sites purely on mobile. I care about to rank higher on Yahoo oneSearch or making sure that Taptu, abphone, Medio, JumpTap, FAST or find.mobi have you on the index.

I speak to CEO’s of mobile search companies and talk about their theories of mobile seo, what their search engines look for and then use these ideas in implementations.

Usually most of my mobile seo implementations have been run with mobile advertising campaigns and I have to say the marriage of both of these bear’s fruit. For the porn and mobile marketing industry I am working on my own special “alt tag” use to optimise certain images for visual mobile search companies and services.

On top of that, I prefer to use the term tags rather than keywords in mobile as I find that mobile search engines are slightly different – especially with vertical mobile search services.

At the moment, I am learning with every optimisation. Text mobile sites are very different than image (video or porn sites) and indexing is a lot more complex.

Mobile search engines tend to be based on traffic and “popularity” which means that getting traffic and social media is essential for mobile seo success.

Thanks everyone for your support.

Mo'Jiva Mobile Advertising Campaign Set-up

After it only took me 3 minutes to set up a campaign as a publisher with mKhoj; I saw a press release from new mobile advertising agency Mo'Jiva. Then I decided to see how long it would take me set up a campaign as an advertiser with the Mo'Jiva.

I logged into Mo'Jiva.com then I chose advertiser. The platform is very clean and if you have set up a mobile advertising campaign before, it is no problem to navigate.

The navigation was simple and I chose not to do anything tricky and stick to the pre-set options to see how long it would take me to set up. I used the gomo.zinadoo.mobi URL (huge article on the uptake of this URL on its way).

But there were a couple of innovative or strange depending on how you look at it features.

For example, as you set up the campaign you have to choose your own countries and operators. There is not a list but you add countries into a search box and then you accept them. If you have no idea of your target market and or are trying to get visibility in Spain this might be a bit cumbersome.

Mo'Jiva was boasting about geo-location advertising - is this it? I added USA, UK and Germany.

But placing bids was extremely simple and by the time I got to this stage - just before payment - only 6 minutes had passed. To be honest, I didn't notic the Pay per View tab in this screen shot as I was setting up. I will go back and check it out.

I found the schedule for setting up ads a bit lengthy. It is not something I personally would have the time to do. But if I am optimising a site or running a campaign for someone in the US from Europe - I imagine that this would be a vital tool.

So all in all, Mo'Jiva seems to have passed the ease of use test. Now I did use the Place Schedule to set up a 2 week campaign and I did buy USD 25 of credit. Results and effectiveness of the campaign on the way!

mKhoj mobile advertising campaign

So I have just set up an ad campaign as a publisher with mKhoj and it took me 3 minutes. I jest you not.

Actually, I am not sure if this is great as it was so easy, I didn't really have the opportunity to personalise or target my advertising needs. I suppose its a double sided coin. On the one side, easy is essential. On the other side when you get more experienced with campaigns you want more choice. (EG. part approve some ads, before others etc).

But, this was very easy and fast.

The top screen shot shows the one page ad campaign set-up. You add the site name ad then the URL and select the criteria for the site (news, portals etc).

Then you choose the ad category and if its adult.

After that you see this (image below) where you select the type, the way you approve, filter the keywords (which is interesting use of competitive filtering) and add your keywords.

That is it! It took me 3 minutes in total. I will be running a new campaign more results to follow - there is a pre-installed analytics tool as well.

David Harper CEO Winksite on Responsible Formatting of Mobile Sites

Yikes. I am not alone. David Harper from Winksite (another mobile web site maker that I am about to test) and I spoke on the phone.

He made me aware of this: http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/

Apparently my issues of the formatting redirection to mobile site thingy is common knowledge and well know. There is even a manifesto on it. These issues of transcoding and redirection seem to be a huge problem.

I mean I know this as we all wrote about Vodafone/ Novarra etc. But now I have experienced it first hand I am gutted. Thank-god that there are people actively trying to sort this out and I am not a developer but will be implementing some of things that Rich and David suggest to change the gomonews.mobi site.

Thanks David

CTO Wapple Rich Holdsworth on the Mobile Frames bad for Mobile Browser issue

Yikes the phone has been ringing non-stop; lots of people have a frames for mobile browsers story to share. But most importantly Rich Holdsworth the CTO of Wapple got back to me immediately with regards to the frames issue and problems I am having with the frames on the site.

1. Good News: I am not going mad. I don’t have frames on my site and Wapple (according to Rich) would NEVER push frames on mobile.
2. Bad news: Go Daddy the company I purchased the mobi site from is to blame.
3. More Bad News:  I chose Go Daddy because the company claims to be mobile friendly and is part of the W3C.
4. Even More Bad News: Go Daddy is adding the frames to my site and making my mobile site unreadable.
5. Conclusion: Go Daddy BAD.

So what do I do?

Basically, I have lots of instructions from Wapple on how to solve this problem. I need to give an IP address to GoDaddy and then the issue can be sorted out.

I know GoDaddy is cheap – but this is terrible that they are taking my site re-hosting it on GoDaddy adding frames and then pushing the content. BAD. BAD. BAD.

What we think?
Thanks Wapple for getting back so quickly. But no thanks to Go Daddy for messing up with my mobi site. I am thinking of a getting another site m.gomonews.com to see if that solves the redirection issue to the mobile site - from a new provider.

Mobile Web browsers don't like frames - but what can we do about it?

I am all confused. I am very good at making mobile sites. At least, I thought I was. Today I get an email from Ronan Cremin from Find.mobi.  I have asked him for some help improving GoMo News for SEO purposes on find.mobi and also adding (yes, I am asking for favours) some porn sites that I am currently doing the SEO for to be indexed.  He has been extremely helpful and today he told me about the issues or problems with gomonews.mobi and the projects I have.

There are some issues with the porn sites that are video based and that they are just too big to render for mobile.  But at least he tried – I did suggest to the company that they remove the number of videos available on the home page – but they said this is their bread and butter – so didn’t.

This is one of those hiccups with Mobile SEO as you know what to do – but if the company doesn’t want to change – you are a bit stuck.

But, my issues are related to GoMo News.

Apparently, I have frames on Gomonews.mobi.  Ronan says that frames are a huge no no and mobile browsers hate them. GoMo News will only work on S60 devices or the iPhone. But, these frames -

1. How did they get there?
2. Who put them there?
3. How do I get rid of them when I can’t find them?

I made the site from scratch with Wapple. It’s not brilliant but it’s not awful (I just need to spend some quality time on it) –but as hard as I try I can’t find any frames. Then I do a search on the Wapple portal for code that looks like a frame and I can’t see it either? I have opened up a help ticket with Wapple to see if they can solve the problem. But I can’t fix what I simply can’t see – and something that I can’t actually remember including.

Hmmm. But if frames are that bad for mobile sites – should they even be offered to consumers.
Yikes all these questions.  I am not going to try and find some answers.

Mobile Marketing Forum Mobile SEO a reality

The Mobile Internet is disjointed. All of these mobile sites from WAP. or m. or .mobile or mobi is creating a piecemeal ecosystem.

Everyone is confused as to what is the best for mobile Internet sites and which optimisation services work.

For the first time though, people have actually started asking the question - which is the best way to optimise - rather than which is the fastest way to get mobile. Recently I heard some stats that 45% of top brands had gone mobile.

Yikes. The majority of these "gone mobile deployments" were done with crass transcoding techniques. Transcoding does very little for Mobile SEO.

I spoke to a couple of brands at Mobile Marketing Forum about this. I don't claim to have all the answers but I think the use of WAP. sites needs to be phased out. WAP is an unhealthy old term that means very little. There needs to be common standards not just form dotmobi -but from the search engines stating which sites they favour.

How does mobile search engine Taptu play the Mobile SEO game?

During my conversation with Taptu’s SVP Bob Last (see www.gomonews.com) I touched on the subject of Mobile SEO.

I wanted to know if there was an “add your site” service to Taptu and what SEO measures (if any) were in place.

Bob said that Taptu was primarily a social assisted search. Issues of page rank and links were pointless.

Moreover, you can’t play the traditional SEO game with Taptu. It works on the basis of traffic, popularity and discussion. The site that gets the most hits gets to the top of Taptu and that is it.

Taptu prides itself on being a pure mobile centric search engine. The real estate is primarily mobile. Taptu indexes what is hot and that is how it works in the social media paradigm. What is hot is determined by votes, click through etc.

Taptu is about discussion and that forms the basis of the SEO. Get traffic, get indexed.

This seems fair, but niche services might not get the visibility they need or as I have said in the past - the need of mobile advertising and buying traffic becomes more important on mobile.

Ready.mobi

I am getting addicted to ready.mobi. The way in which the site is analysed with results and a ranking system based on numbers is very good and very very easy to understand.

Here is an overview of a transcoding GoMo News site from Get Mobile. Http://gomonews.getmobile.com

The above shows the cost of getting the page and the speed. Below you can see what the exact site looks like on different mobile devices. 

If anyone does this and gets a 5 for a NON dotmobi site - please let me know.

Mobile SEO and Find.mobi chat with Ronan Cremin Director of Developer Initiatives dotmobi

I met CTO of dotmobi James Pearce in Las Vegas at the GoMo News Blender. While sharing tequila's James raved to me about the new find.mobi mobile search engine. I jested that I didn't believe that it was any good and like a Texan cowboy he whipped out his mobile device and surfed on the site.

Within seconds I was typing Bena Roberts into the web browser. There were a few semi-relevant answers. Then I asked him to type in gomonews as we have a gomonews.mobi site.

Gomonews.mobi wasn't there. I laughed and James looked perplexed and said that he would hook me up with the Find.mobi search guru. So today, I had a lovely chat with Ronan Cremin about Find.mobi, getting indexed on mobile and SEO techniques.

But before we started Ronan gave me a some sound bites. He said, with mobile search, please remember there is nothing out there to be found. The fixed web is so large that, regardless of what you look for, you are almost guaranteed to find *something*. This is not yet the case with mobile so often times results for a purely mobile web search can be dissapointing, but the good news is that month-on-month growth in the mobile web is really fast (as much as 15%), so it is getting better all the time.

But then I took over. I first told him about my experience with mobile SEO and how to counter the issue that linking doesn't seem to matter on mobile at the moment.

We both agreed that page titles were so much more vital in mobile than ever before. He then told that me that mobile hygiene was vital to mobile SEO. I asked if by this he met using the W3C guidelines and dotmobi tools to check the quality of the WAP site? He said, "that is exactly what he meant".

“Specifically, a well-formed mobile page helps a crawler to determine that it is actually a mobile-friendly page, and worth including in its index. The mobile search engine crawlers use multiple clues to determine whether a page is mobile-friendly or not, and being well-formed and using mobile best practices is a good place to start. As an example of these, sites should use access keys and tel: links etc”.

I then steered him to the actual indexing of content on dotmobi. I quizzed as to why my mobile site wasn't there and said that the hygiene was great because it got a number 4 (see ready.mobi). He agreed that anything above a 3 was good and apologised.

He said that indexing was automatic and that Find.mobi crawls sites and then tests them in up to twenty different forms (WAP./ m./mobile./.mobi etc) to find if they are mobile ready. It then indexes the mobile version only.

I thought that was impressive, but mentioned that an index might be better as some sites are transcoded and that can mask the hygiene of the mobile version.

He countered by saying, “We'll usually have no problem picking up the transcoded versions too. Many of the sites in find.mobi are versions of desktop sites mobilised by the likes of Crisp Wireless etc”.

Ronan also said something very interesting. He said that just because a site was light on content – it didn't make it automatically mobile friendly. I thought that was interesting. I have read on several occasions that light sites are great for mobile. In fact, many blogging software companies encourage this.

But he elaborated
“The mobile web isn't just about lighter content, it is about contextually sympathetic content that is designed for people on the move. A good mobile search engine needs to filter out all of these "accidentally light" pages and separate the wheat from the chaff”.

On a competitive level, I asked if Find.mobi thought Taptu, abphone etc were friends or competitors. Ronan said, not only were they competitors – Find.mobi wanted to carve the way in how to do mobile search properly.
He said, “we're trying to lead by example - by showing how mobile search can be done if you take a fresh start”.

We also discussed Google's involvement in Find.mobi. Apparently, Google is a key investor; but this is unfortunately under NDA. 

I am currently running two small SEO projects and asked Ronan if I could send him the sites for quick indexing – he said "yes – but only if they score 3 or 4 in ready.mobi" so right now he is my new best friend! Thank-you.

CTIA Live Interview part 2 with CEO JumpTap Dan Olschwang on Mobile SEO and Mobile Advertising

This takes a bit of time to render but its worth listening to as Dan talks about mobile advertising and mobile SEO.

Mobile SEO mobile barcode generator by Wapple

The mobile site creation company Wapple has an excellent service called the data matrix generator.

What is it?

Well basically it’s an option available that enables users to create data matrix barcodes for their WAP sites or special WAP pages.

Why is this good?

Basically, it means that parts of the WAP site can be marketed via mobile coupons or visual data matrix codes can facilitate online, above or below the line campaigns to maximise publicity.

What about SEO?

Well this is what I really like about this service is that it allows users to tailor the URL of the data matrix to the keyword search terms.

This means that each page or campaign or WAP site can be targeted specifically for the content. This will maximise the reach and relevancy of the mobile marketing campaigns and optimise the query to the search terms.

For example, this will become increasingly essential for social media or barcode searches in the future. The contextual search results for images or news etc will be replaced with clustered mobile boxes that users can pre-determine. So coupon fans will be able to get coupon results of search queries or save barcodes such as these as bookmarks for reference.

On top of that the code could stay the same but the promotion change so that every week users would know it was one click to fresh promotions and content.

Masterclass: Practical & Proven Tips on Successfully Implementing Mobile in your Integrated Marketing Strategy

I will be giving a Mobile Advertising Masterclass at this conference in Singapore in May. Here is the agenda and GoMo/ Mobile Seo Readers can benefit from a considerable disount by mentioning GOMO during the purchase process.

http://www.iqpc.com/ShowEvent.aspx?id=76380

A              08:30 – 13:30 [includes Working Lunch Break]

Getting Your Mobile Plan Going: Practical & Proven Tips on Successfully Implementing Mobile in your Integrated Marketing Strategy

This masterclass will give brands and media companies the foundation they need to start and implement a mobile marketing campaign. It will look at PPC and search campaigns and strategies in which they can be implemented into the WAP portal. The session will also touch on Mobile Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the demands brands have for mobile advertising and marketing. You will also be guided through the differences between a WAP site, a transcoded site and a mobi site. After this masterclass, brands and media companies will know how to launch and what to consider when implementing a mobile campaign.

Tailored for media brands and agencies:
·          Mobile is the new media and the next generation of marketing communication
·          Pushing a brand via mobile is essential – but how? Techniques and practical skills to do it right
·          Understanding what mobile search entails and how it can change the effectiveness of your media campaign with integrated mobile advertising
·          What is the most important aspect of a mobile media campaign and what are the differences between mobile search and advertising?

Bena Roberts, Founder GoMo News and GoMo Strategy

About your Masterclass Leader

AdMob mobile advertising campaign improvements

AdMob has made some significant changes and improvements to its advertising management system.

These include the following changes:

1.       The daily budget.

For the first time, users can set and manage a budget for the campaign to keep in total control of costs. This is very simple to follow and is pushed visibly on the home page of the management system with in red highlights.

   

2.       The landing page.

The moment I changed the landing page for adverts on AdMob a banner popped up and said that the minimum bid rate for the “news” section of operator mobile portals had increased to USD 0.25. This is interesting as it indicates a greater demand for this page.

I am also finding that on average the minimum bid rates average seems to be USD 0.22 – 0.25. But if you look hard enough on AdMob you can still bid at a favourable USD 0.10 rate. On competitors portals rates as low as USD 0.02 can also be obtained but only for text not display ads.

3.       Fabulous Ad Tips

If these Ad Tips are not new: please excuse me. This is the first time that I have actually noticed them. They are great ways of making the landing page much more personalised and effective and could actually increase click through as users know that the advertiser is aware of their own device.

   

What we think?

The AdMob I saw today was much better than the one I saw the first time I tested it six months ago.

I am about to run another USD 50 campaign to push the zinadoo website gomo.zinadoo.mobi I wrote about below. More after one month on the progress.

M-SEO by Zinadoo

I received an email from mobile search company Mobiseer this morning. It said that Zinadoo its sister WAP site creating company and Mobiseer were teaming up and were about to launch a series of new services offering Mobile SEO services. These will be under the name of M-SEO.

I took a quick look at Mobiseer and didn’t see any changes so then I went to Zinadoo where I found an “optimise” button. Without delay I decided to create a brand new WAP site that I will track monthly on this site as a test of how or if the SEO worked.

The brand new WAP site see here: http://gomo.zinadoo.mobi

And here is how the M-SEO went.

After spending less than five minutes creating my GoMo Strategy site, I hit the “optimise” button. This lead me to a site asking me for some personal information followed by the ability to fully search engine optimise the mobile site in only three steps.

 

It took literally minutes and the questions asked were made for dummies. This means that they were no brainers. Users simply filled out some easy questions about site name and description and there you go.

But. The very interesting twist on this is that Zinadoo was offering users the ability to search the whole WAP site or just the home page or the keywords.  This is what we have spoken about in the past.

Keywords vs site crawling for mobile. Its much easier and more feasible to search for tags and keywords on mobile than it is by crawling or getting search engines to sweep sites. This also fits into the whole Mobiseer Strategy where social segments and book marks are tagged by individuals to keep a mobile social maker for WAP sites.

M-SEO is not determined but the ability to search only keywords is a great option to add to any WAP site.

Following on,  part b of the site set up was about your visitors. This was obviously for mobile advertising reasons for Zinadoo. The sites are free but Zinadoo does add adverts to the header.  This means that Zinadoo can target the ads to the data inputted by the site owners to maximise CTR on their adverts as well – hence funding this service.

What we think?

OK, this is for consumer primarily –but its fast, simple easy and a complete no –brainer.

I am going to start tracking this site and will index it on some Mobile Search Engines and report back in about 4 weeks with what happens.

 

Mobile SEO White Paper

We realize we have been a bit quiet on the Mobile SEO side of things. This is because I wanted to work on a white paper outlining the differences between Mobile SEO and Online SEO.

We are also about to hire a new guru in this space (more news later on).

But last night I had an extremely long conversation about federated mobile search and Mobile SEO with the Co-Founder of Medio Michael "Luni" Libes. Michael had some thoughts on the criteria of optimization and issues such as getting placed on oneSearch over Google.

This is where mobile gets interesting and this is where a real code of how to optimize the WAP site for search is vital. There are too many misconceptions at the moment such as

“linking is vital for a mobile site”

that need to be addressed.

I am working on this now and hope to publish before the Mobile World Congress when our new GoMo News site goes live.

In the meantime, our Mobile SEO consultancy is open and please feel free to contact me to discuss requirements.

Wapple Canvas

 

I received an email from Wapple yesterday announcing the original Wapple portal was being phased out and everyone needed to upgrade to the all new Wapple Canvas.

So, bearing in mind we are gearing up to offer Mobile SEO services, I documented the new site creation and the ability to add links, image tags, keywords and general search optimization services.

As part of GoMo News Mobile SEO, I will write a full report when we launch – but in the meantime – Wapple has improved its Mobile SEO from the original portal tenfold.

I have always been unsure about template mobile designs offering as good as mobile SEO as self-created designs. Indeed, a self-created design could be optimized tighter – but Wapple Canvas is as good as it gets without.

There are optimization tools for every page which is ideal for small companies. There is also a datamatrix URL generator that can be optimized for target audience – which is very nifty as search keywords can be added.

But anyway – the new WAP site should go live by the end of the week.

I should be serving mobile adverts form AdMob, Mkhoj, mpression and Google on the site.