(Photo via Edans)

Is your website optimized for mobile devices? Even though the latest service providers and phones, like the iPhone, the G1, and the BlackBerry Storm, can handle large amounts of data, images, and even special features like JavaScript and Flash, there are an entirely different set of concerns for mobile devices, and this audience is becoming hard to ignore.

Why should you care?

• The mobile marketplace is still young. Now is the time to get ahead of your competition. Mobile users tend to navigate away from websites that are difficult to use and will go to the competition.
• Mobile web searches shows a desire to take immediate action. That means that your mobile customers are much more valuable. You should not be losing them due to lack of usability.
• You may be sending out emails to people who will be opening your website on their phone. What do you want it to look like?
• The share of your customers searching for your services or viewing your website from their phones is only going to increase in the near future. Currently, 75% of all mobile search is done on iPhones, which only have a 10% market share. This disproportion is likely to correct itself as other phones catch up with the iPhone.

There are also potential reasons why this mobile audience might be even higher value that standard users. First of all, user who reach your site via mobile search are generally not browsing: they are searching out of an immediate need that can’t wait until they return to their desk. This often means that they skip steps in the buying process and are therefore more likely to act on their search results.

Secondly, for B2B websites, you can’t forget about the traveling executive. You might sell a client on a proposal, but he has to get it approved by his boss, whose first impression of your company is on a 2″ x 3″ screen, in an airport, on 3 hours of sleep.

So the main concerns are bandwidth efficiency, usability on a small screen, and searchability.

Optimizing your mobile presence the right way:

You may be tempted to create a separate mobile version of your website (on a .mobi domain, for example). Not only does this create duplicate content which will hurt your search engine rankings, but it’s also more trouble than necessary. Easier and more effective is to just create a separate stylesheet for handhelds. The browser will automatically detect the correct one, and serve the exact same content on the exact same URL, but format it for a mobile device.

On a related note, if your website still used in-line stylings and not cascading style sheets, it should.

Get a list of mobile search engines and directories, especially those related to your industry. Since some phones use proprietary search applications with different algorithms, it’s important to do SEO on their turf too.

Tags: mobile phones, ROI, SEO, SESNY