• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 14, 2009

Abid Atilay, CIO at Cepmaster, a software application developer in Istanbul, Turkey supporting telecom carriers, came to Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, Calif. to become educated on building mobile applications and optimizing mobile Web sites.

Carriers in Turkey have begun to create mobile portals that allow consumers to access and download news and movie trailers, Atilay says. "We want to make a global portal, but we need to know how to optimize those sites," he says. "So we are creating these sites, but the mobile Web sites need to be found by people searching the Web."

Atilay knows the basic techniques to optimize mobile sites, but had expected to find "brilliant" techniques at the conference. "Mobile Web sites in the United States aren't that important, but in Europe everyone is crazy about it, you know," he tells Online Media Daily. "Why not? There are billions of cell phones in the world."

The mobile Web in the United States, unfortunately, isn't as far along in the game as some Europeans believe. The U.S. telecom carriers have had closed networks for years. "They have older infrastructures," says Andrew Shotland, owner of Local SEO Guide, an SEO in Pleasanton, Calif. "The newer infrastructure in some countries lets international carriers build networks much faster, which in turn lets consumers adopt cool applications."

So what's the difference between optimizing for Web versus mobile searches? The "dirty little secret is there's some difference, but it's not significant," Shotland says -- although he's not seeing an overzealous amount of interest from international clients.

Shotland pointed to Google Web search on Apple's iPhone to explain. As smartphones become more sophisticated, people will conduct more searches on their phone, similar to the way they do on a computer. Think mobile optimization. This means designing a mobile site that's "attractive" and "useful" for people who consume information on the go.

"I have many clients who have a mobile version of their Web site that search engine spiders can't crawl, because they contain a lot of Flash, which the iPhone doesn't support," Shotland says. "Most publishers haven't paid attention to the mobile experience because it's the kind of thing they think will happen next year, not now."

But there's lots of valuable traffic that is ripe for the picking from consumers looking for that phone number as they drive or walk through town. In March, 20.7 million U.S. consumers relied on a mobile browser for information -- up 34% compared with a year ago, according to comScore. The number of people who sought local information on a mobile device grew 51% from March 2008 to March 2009, the research firm says.

As for the tips and tricks to optimize a site for mobile searchers, Shotland says companies need to follow normal search optimization processes, but must also remember to display physical addresses so search engine crawlers can read them.

Too often, companies forget to add links to mobile sites, which search engine crawlers need to find the content. Think about the typical mobile searches for local businesses, where patterns tend to differ slightly.

Having a mobile site means creating a duplicate of the original Web site -- which can cause problems, Shotland says. "You don't want to have competing pages that target the same thing," he says.

Larger sites have a bigger problem because the search engines only allocate a certain amount of time to crawl each site based on a variety of factors, such as the link profile and authority, according to Shotland. A 50-million-page Web site duplicated to produce a mobile Web site probably will not get all its pages indexed because of the time it takes to crawl them all. SEO professionals need to set up pages on sites, so mobile Web pages attract crawlers that index the mobile Web, and vice versa for Web pages that people access from computers.

It has also been noted that the new Safari Web browser will have implications for local search. Michael Boland at Search Engine Watch notes that Safari will have location awareness "backed into the browser, which presents many opportunities for local search sites to serve content."