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.

Thanks to Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry software, there has been an exponential explosion of mobile smartphones hitting the market; the average consumer is presented with at least 20 different and competitive choices when shopping for a PDA or smartphone.

The ubiquity of these phones has forced most manufacturers to undercut prices to stay in the game against tougher competitors, which leads to an abundance of phones in consumers’ hands that are full of features like Wi-Fi, web browsing, MP3 playback, movie playback, etc.  Countries like China are known for the majority of their internet/broadband users accessing websites and interacting with one another through mobile media rather than going home and logging onto their personal computers.  More and more, businesses marketing to specific audiences are taking into consideration how their websites are viewed on mobile phones; this brings us to the question: how do I optimize my website for mobile media?

Overall, search engine optimization for mobile and smart phones isn’t vastly different from normal SEO practices for websites viewed on a desktop; however there are key concerns which desktop web developers don’t necessarily have to consider such as:

1.Website Resolution: Can the website be viewed correctly?

There are thousands of smart phones on the market that are available to consumers at varying prices which means that when designing a website to be veiwed on a phone you have to take into consideration that your iPhone touch screen isn’t the same size as a HTC Tough Diamond touch screen, nor do they share the same resolution.

2.Images:  How many are there and where are they placed?

The amount of images you have is directly related to how long your website takes to load and, consequently, how long a person will stay there.  Too many images obviously causes a longer download time (despite the revolutionary 3G network) and most users will immediately bounce off your page if what they’re looking for doesn’t come up fast enough.  Images that are larger than the user’s screen will force them to scroll around just to see an entire image.

3.Filesize: Just how much content should you have?

Despite the rise in broadband networks and drop in data-usage plans, how much content and the total size of your webpage still directly influences how many hits your website will get from mobile phones.  Many phone plans charge their subscribers based on how much data (bandwith) they use every time they log onto the web from their phone; which means the longer your site takes to load, the more you are costing a potential customer and the less likely they are to come back to your website.

4.Scrolling: How much should a person scroll before reaching content?

This is something that happens with normal websites viewed on computers at home or the office; who wants to scroll around just to get the content they need?  The most important information should be available the moment a user logs onto your website to minimize your bounce rate.