Creating a Mobile Friendly Website: SEO and the iPhone

We are no longer reliant on desktops or laptops to stay abreast on our fast paced lives when we can hold full access to news, our email and the internet in our hand—on our phones. Although smart phones like the blackberry remain the favorite of many, the apple iPhone is a force to be reckoned with. According an article in the the New York Times, 84.8 percent of iPhone users use their phones to check news and information, 58.6 percent of iPhone users actually utilized a search engine from their phones (compared to 37 percent of smartphone users). Needless to say, with millions of iPhone users, and with this number growing every day, this is a lot of people that are accessing and searching web pages from their mobile devices. Is this going to change the future of SEO?

Yes, this is changing the future of SEO and there are two things I think we should be aware of as an SEO firm and that your business should be aware of as you question your need for an SEO firm. Mobile access to the internet is changing the nature of search, here’s how:

1. Well, there are several things I want to say here, but one is that Google has released an advanced voice search application which will allow iPhone users to simply tell their phones what they are looking for and the phone will respond with the appropriate answer via websites, business listings, etc. This is a necessary change for SEO companies because we need to analyze what it is that people will ‘verbalize’ when searching rather than just type into their preferred search engine. With this type of quick search, the iPhone will often respond to this search with a link or a phone number. This convenient delivery is great for the iPhone user looking for the nearest hotel or business, but is detrimental if your hotel or business does not have a high enough ranking to be in the top links/ numbers delivered on the phone. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that local businesses, food services, hotels, service providers, etc. have sites that have the proper SEO. Some say that one method of proper SEO for iPhones would be to include the phone number of your business in the meta description. I am continuing to research the subject and would love to hear from others doing the same. There is a need to learn how to target this huge population of iPhone internet users—they are a crucial target market.

2. The iPhone has a new SEO app called ProSEO – iPhone SEO Content Analyzer . You should just click on the link to read about it, because that is where I got my information, but if you want to hear it from me, this is a new application that will analyze the SEO on a website. It only costs $14.99, but its features contain the following:

• A List of META keywords, description and tags from the site
• “Tag counts”- this feature counts tags in a site to reveal more about the site composition
• Title tag contents.
• Body text without tags
• A feature that counts and figures the percentage of words that are not counted by search engines. This allows sites to see how effective their copy is in the “eyes” of search engines.
• Total word count
• Phrase counter to help determine repetitive phrases length 1-5 words
• The anchor tags (will reveal if there is an image in link text)
• Link text/ inner HTML of the tag
• Any images in the document
• The image text (“alt” attribute)

This seems like a fascinating application and shows the advance technology of the iPhone, but I’m not sure who will use this except SEO companies and others interested in the breakdown of web sites. I wonder how this application will be used and how we can learn from it.