My Mobile SEO Toolbox: Top Tools for Mobile SEO Analysis
Which tools are best for mobile SEO purposes? An overview of the top tools which will give you the best results.
Post from Aleyda Solis on State of Search
My Mobile SEO Toolbox: Top Tools for Mobile SEO Analysis
iOS Still Dominates Mobile And Tablet Traffic In UK
According to Adobe, 84% of UK traffic via a tablet device went to iOS in February 2013, with 53.5% of UK traffic via mobile phones doing the same.
Post from Carla Marshall on State of Search
iOS Still Dominates Mobile And Tablet Traffic In UK
Google Analytics for Mobile: Where Art Thou?
Data is vital to digital marketers and without an official Google Analytics app for the iPhone, State of Search recommends top free Google Analytics Apps.
Post from Ned Poulter on State of Search
Google Analytics for Mobile: Where Art Thou?
The Impact of Mobile Gifting
We know that mobile is hot and it’s going places. And gifts are following closely. Put those together and there is even more to look at.Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Search
The Impact of Mobile Gifting
The Mobile Web vs. Mobile App Choice: Which is better for you?
An overview of the different alternatives to create a Mobile presence and how to optimize it to improve its visibility.
Post from Aleyda Solis on State of Search
The Mobile Web vs. Mobile App Choice: Which is better for you?
Tracking Mobile Visitors in Google Analytics: A Checklist Guide for Mobile Insights
It is hardly surprising that “mobile” is becoming such a hot topic among digital marketers: comScore reported that in August 2012, 13% of total internet pageviews (roughly 1 in 8!) were from mobile devices (phones and tablets combined). And these numbers Continue reading »
Making search-friendly mobile websites — now in 11 more languages
Webmaster level: Intermediate
As more and more users worldwide with mobile devices access the Internet, it’s fantastic to see so many websites making their content accessible and useful for those devices. To help webmasters optimize their sites we launched our recommendations for smartphones, feature-phones, tablets, and Googlebot-friendly sites in June 2012.
We’re happy to announce that those recommendations are now also available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. US-based webmasters are welcome to read the UK-English version.
We welcome you to go through our recommendations, pick the configuration that you feel will work best with your website, and get ready to jump on the mobile bandwagon!
Thanks to the fantastic webmaster-outreach team in Dublin, Tokyo and Beijing for making this possible!
Posted (but not translated) by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zürich Switzerland
Giving Tablet Users the Full-Sized Web
Webmaster level: All
Since we announced Google’s recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites, a common question we’ve heard from webmasters is how to best treat tablet devices. This is a similar question Android app developers face, and for that the Building Quality Tablet Apps guide is a great starting point.
Although we do not have specific recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites, there are some tips for building websites that serve smartphone and tablet users well.
When considering your site’s visitors using tablets, it’s important to think about both the devices and what users expect. Compared to smartphones, tablets have larger touch screens and are typically used on Wi-Fi connections. Tablets offer a browsing experience that can be as rich as any desktop or laptop machine, in a more mobile, lightweight, and generally more convenient package. This means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your site’s smartphone site.
Our recommendation for smartphone-optimized sites is to use responsive web design, which means you have one site to serve all devices. If your website uses responsive web design as recommended, be sure to test your website on a variety of tablets to make sure it serves them well too. Remember, just like for smartphones, there are a variety of device sizes and screen resolutions to test.
Another common configuration is to have separate sites for desktops and smartphones, and to redirect users to the relevant version. If you use this configuration, be careful not to inadvertently redirect tablet users to the smartphone-optimized site too.
Telling Android smartphones and tablets apart
For Android-based devices, it’s easy to distinguish between smartphones and tablets using the user-agent string supplied by browsers: Although both Android smartphones and tablets will include the word “Android” in the user-agent string, only the user-agent of smartphones will include the word “Mobile”.
In summary, any Android device that does not have the word “Mobile” in the user-agent is a tablet (or other large screen) device that is best served the desktop site.
For example, here’s the user-agent from Chrome on a Galaxy Nexus smartphone:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; Galaxy Nexus Build/JRO03O) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Mobile Safari/535.19
Or from Firefox on the Galaxy Nexus:
Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0
Compare those to the user-agent from Chrome on Nexus 7:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; Nexus 7 Build/JRO03S) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19
Or from Firefox on Nexus 7:
Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0
Because the Galaxy Nexus’s user agent includes “Mobile” it should be served your smartphone-optimized website, while the Nexus 7 should receive the full site.
We hope this helps you build better tablet-optimized websites. As always, please ask on our Webmaster Help forums if you have more questions.
Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, and Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com
