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.

Last week we attended Search Engine Strategies New York, the online marketing conference and expo, and one theme that kept coming up in various contexts was the concept of real value. Different industries talk about it different way: in economics it’s “utility”, in customer relations it’s “satisfaction”, but the idea is the same: businesses and consumers alike are paying more attention to each dollar that they spend and how it benefits them.

Among consumers, that means brand loyalty is waning as people search for better deals, perhaps reevaluating and switching brands, or even going with generics. Among businesses, it means focusing more on ROI, and making sure your service providers are getting the right kind of results and giving you the metrics to back them up.

It’s a familiar concept at Blue Fountain Media; we’ve always held ourselves accountable for the success of our clients, focusing on your goals, and only recommending solutions that will yield a return on investment. We enjoy working with clients who feel the same way about their own customers. It was nice to have our strategy validated by others, like keynote speaker John Gerzema, who spoke about the erosion of trust, about the lack of permanence of institutions that used to appear untouchable, but ultimately about the opportunity that the crisis has created for smart companies. It’s a win for the consumer, and a win for businesses willing to take a step back, and make sure that they’re adding value that’s worth paying for.

One of the things that I kept hearing over and over again at SES New York, was that if you are running a social media marketing campaign and it’s not working, just stop it and do something else. If you have a corporate blog and it’s not getting you any attention, start over. If your Facebook page has 10 members, all of whom are part of your extended family, shut down that page. There is no use in sinking time and effort into social media activity that is not delivering results for your company.

Here are a few tips on things to watch out for:

1. Do not add a reviews section to your website if you have no reviews to show for products. Not everyone can be Amazon.com.

2. Don’t hire community managers for your “online communities” if you have no communities to manage.

3. Instead of trying to create groups on every single social networking website, join communities where you can find followers and relevant members.

4. Instead of providing every single possible way of sharing a website (Delicious, Digg, Facebook, plus 50 other sharing websites) offer the ones that are most pertinent to members of your audience. That will probably reduce the list to about 3 or 4.

5. If your company does something really boring, don’t try and make that interesting. Instead create a community around a topic that your customers would care about.

Alhan and I just got back to the office after three days at the Search Engine Strategies New York Conference and Expo. We’ll be writing more about the takeaways from that experience a little later. But first I wanted to point out something I noticed this morning:

One technique to avoid unwanted clicks and the charges associated with them is to write ad copy which will “filter” unqualified users by discouraging them from clicking. Above, on our own AdWords creative, we use the filter “$5K+”, which gives users a clue about the level of our services.

Another New York firm, Avatar, has been doing the same thing (“$20,000 and up”), but now they’ve added a second filter on the same ad: “Currently NOT Hiring”.

When used properly, filters can be effective at reducing your overall pay-per-click cost. However, they can’t be your only strategy for targeting. First of all, they rely on users reading beyond the ad headline, which is sometimes a tall order. Secondly, they can lower your click-through rate, which lowers your AdWords Quality Score, which drives up your minimum cost-per-click. (Basically, if your ad shows a lot but doesn’t get clicked on, Google will see it as a low-quality ad; since they want to provide a quality experience for users, they discourage low-quality ads by making them more expensive.)

One way to reduce the number of unqualified impressions before you start filtering clicks is through negative keywords. If we’re bidding on the keyword phrase “new york web design”, but don’t want users to click our ad searching for “new york web design jobs”, we could just add “jobs” as a negative keyword.

Fortunately, we don’t have that problem; we are hiring.