Different Ways To Optimize Your Site For Mobile
There are actually a couple of ways to optimize your site for mobile devices. This has become more and more important over the past few years. Nearly everyone has a smart phone and quite a few people have tablet devices. More importantly some internet users do not even have access to anything other then a smart phone or tablet. So optimizing for these potential visitors is incredibly important. Directly mobile optimization does not effect your search engine standings within the search results. Though there is actually one major ranking factor that could be harmed by not having a mobile optimized site.
NON MOBILE OPTIMIZED SITES EFFECT YOUR SEARCH ENGINE PERFORMANCE
It’s not apparent straight away to where the link is. Though you will start to notice that if your site isn’t optimized for mobile then visitors can tend to bounce off your site once they realize they can’t easily read what you have to say. Sounds a bit out there really but statistics have shown that this is actually the case. Your website bounce rate is actually a major ranking factor. Think about it, if you was Google and you were aiming to display the most relevant results then surely a site which has users bounce of it frequently can not be of as much value as a site which keeps their visitors on their site. It’s logical thinking. So how can you optimize your site for mobile.
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
Responsive design was brought to us by CSS3 which brought along the media query. It is a fantastic way to get a mobile optimized site as you basically have separate styling for different screen sizes. If you are using a popular CMS, e-commerce or blogging platform. Such as Joomla, Magento, Opencart or wordpress then there are many developers who are developing themes for these platforms which are responsive ready. So if you are willing to do a bit of work on your site and change to a responsive theme then this can be a highly inexpensive route for you to take. Though if you are using either a platform with a bespoke design or a bespoke built platform. Then this could be incredibly time extensive and costly. Converting sites into a responsive design is much harder to achieve then building a site from scratch to be responsive. One major boost to responsive development is the twitter bootstrap framework. It’s a framework that has become a popular base for most templates and websites that are developed these days. So what could be a better approach if a site rebuild is going to be a costly route for you.
WEB APPS
On some platforms such as Magento you can purchase their web app. It basically act’s as a separate website that is only accessed by mobile devices. Actually you most likely have seen a fair few such as Ebay or Amazon. When ever you see a little link saying show main website then you know your using their web app. Responsive design does not have a separate website so being able to see your main website is impossible. There is different web apps out there I suggest having a look at them though I personally have a few problems with them. I seem to always find myself wanting to see their main website no matter how difficult it is to navigate. The web apps I encounter usually haven’t a certain feature incorporated which the main site will have. So I would make your decision wisely on which route to take.
