Bandwidth and Speed Limits
Many people on mobile devices are on limited-bandwidth plans, which means a huge website with a lot of queries in it will suck up their bandwidth and keep them from wanting to come back. Similarly, many mobile devices are noticeably slower than desktop devices, which can make surfing a headache. Both problems are solved the same way: by planning a mobile site to load using the minimum amount of queries and keeping large-bandwidth elements like videos and flash out.

Touch Me There
Mobile devices may or may not have a keyboard (most don’t), but exactly zero of them have a mouse. Instead, a mobile device needs to be built with a touchscreen in mind. The differences are minor, but significant. For example, you can’t build a page that has lots of popups-on-hover, because touchscreens can’t register a hover — it comes up as a longtouch, and that has completely different purposes. You can, however, build a page that’s designed for multitouch, which mice can’t manage.

Purpose Built
The psychological factor also has to be mentioned here. People on mobile devices might well be lounging on their couch, surfing while their spouse watches the last episode of Sherlock again in preparation for the new season to start — or they might be on the bus with a 3-year-old on their lap and a bag of groceries in their other hand. You need to prepare your sites for that second group, and get to the point now.

SEO
The way that your mobile website’s SEO is going to interact with your desktop version’s SEO is going to depend on the answer to a critical question — a question we’ll discuss in the next episode. Seacrested!!

SEO
If you don’t know anything about website SEO, you aren’t a web designer, no matter how elite your HTML and CSS skills — because every website that expects to turn a profit has to be optimized for the search engines, or it’s wasting everyone’s time and money.

The Background
Similarly, you have to understand what ‘background’ pages each client needs to look legitimate. Contact information — everyone. ToS — any SaaS model. Privacy Policy — anyone who takes even a single piece of personal information from their surfers. Site Map — everyone. EULA — anyone that provides an ongoing transaction or service. And so on.

Search
Unless you’re making a very very simple site, you should always include a search bar that allows a user to find whatever page they need from whatever page their on by typing a few words and clicking a button. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to find a page you previously read and being unable to.

Product/Service Information
You can’t do business if you can sell the product or service you’re offering, end of story. You might not need to write the copy yourself, but you’d better be able to include the context the copy will need to have around it in order to succeed.

Call to Action/Payment Services
If you’re actually selling something, you’d better have a checkout — or at the least, a Buy It Now button. If your business model involves some other form of transaction (like a squeeze page or a free download), you’d better make that very clear to your visitors.

Once you’re comfortable designing desktop sites with these basic business elements, we can talk about designing mobile websites…and we will in upcoming posts.

What many SEO neophytes don’t realize is that SEO is actually just like an anime villain. It starts out small and weak when your website is just beginning, but at some point you reach a critical mass, and it explodes — a few hits a day turns into a few hundred, and business truly begins. You’ve reached SEO’s second form.

A lot of businesses stop right there. A few hundred hits a day is what they were hoping for — it was their goal — and they don’t see the need to push. But some businesses respond to the new order of magnitude in their traffic by increasing their spending by an order of magnitude — and those are the ones who get to see organic SEO‘s third form.

As your business goes from “we have keywords that we dominate” to “people who know about us search for us by name”, your website’s SEO evolves again as well, from hundreds of hits per day to thousands. Think about some of the times that you’ve searched for a company by name. Was it Simple Green? Big Fish Games? Dot Com Media Moguls? None of these are exactly household names, but they’ve hit enough of the bigtime that their traffic would blow the minds off of anyone who settled for mere ‘success’ in the second form.

But is that organic SEO’s ultimate form? Of course not. The ultimate form of SEO, much like Zen, is no SEO. Ever wonder how much the biggest, baddest websites in the world — the Wikipedias and YouTubes — spend on SEO? The answer is “nothing”. They don’t have to, because the search engines know that when you search for “cat videos”, there’s one place you expect results from, and if they don’t give them to you, they’re failing. Not many companies ever get to see SEO’s final form — and many that do still spend money on SEO anyway — but for the truly ambitious, world-dominating types, getting your SEO for free by being badass enough that the search engines kiss your feet is the way to roll.

Make sure your mobile website queries for resolution and displays in the height and width correct for the device it’s displaying on. Too many times I’ve gone to a site on my Kindle Fire and found that it natively displayed in a column 2/3rds the width of my screen. That’s just bad design.

Optimize for navigation, not information. If you have to move information two clicks further along than it used to be, that’s OK — as long as the path to navigate to it is obvious and easy. A few more finger taps never dissuaded someone determined enough to browse on a mobile device in the first place, but being unable to find the information they want in a reasonable timeframe totally will.

Simplify, edit, simplify, cut the extra, and then simplify again. Traditional websites are meant to be viewed on a nice big screen, giving you comfortable places to put everything — and even then, the best, most usable websites often just have a big catchy graphic and several well-placed links. Mobile sites need to be even simpler than that: they need to maximize the core, relevant information and leave everything else to deeper pages that the surfer can click through to if need be. Breaking the http version of the site into multiple pieces and arranging them in an intuitive hierarchy is an excellent start — but removing the unnecessary bits is even better.

Keep your questions simple. The one thing that unites all smartphone users is a vague (or sometimes very specific) loathing of their keyboards. So if you can avoid forcing them to use their keyboards, do so. If your squeeze page can get by with a ZIP code and an email address, don’t ask for anything else.

Follow the fundamental law of mobile sites: user experience before all else, and your mobile website will be profitable in the end.

Here’s a short look at SOME of the pitfalls that they can stumble unwittingly into:

Content Targeting vs. Not
By default, Adwords leaves the Content Network on. This sounds like a good thing to most people, because it means their ads get more exposure. What they don’t realize is that AdSense (the ‘content network’ that their ads are getting displayed on) isn’t really all that great at targeting. And for every time your ad about water purifiers gets put up on a page about water parks, you run a risk of someone clicking on it even if they have zero interest in water purifiers. You just paid for a click you have no chance of converting, and that’s a waste of cash.

Geo-targeting vs. Not
If you have a business building swimming pools in Malabar, Florida, and you don’t turn Geo-Targeting on, you waste money every time someone from Vancouver, Washington clicks on your ads. Similarly, if you have a website that sells information and you DO turn Geo-Targeting on, you’d better be selling information about just that one town, or you’re missing out on 99.999% of your potential clients.

Choosing The Right Matching
You can choose broad matching (match any phrases that contain these words in any order), phrase matching (match any phrases that contain ONLY these words in any order), or exact matching (match only this precise phrase in this order.) Many people choose broad, figuring again that more exposure is better — but AdWords is about targeting, not about exposure. Oftentimes someone searching for “swimming pool repair” is looking to hire a crew, but someone searching for “how to repair a swimming pool” will rifle your site for information (costing you whatever you paid for his click) and then vanish without ever even potentially becoming a customer.

There are a ton of other ways to lose out with Adwords — we haven’t even gotten into the areas of keyword research, setting variables at the ad vs. groups vs. campaigns level, or how to track results so that you know what’s working and what’s not. In short, there’s only one consistent, correct way to do AdWords, and that’s to get your website’s SEO company to do it for you.

No. No it’s not.

And it shouldn’t be — to a degree, those small business owners are absolutely right. But only to a degree. If you stop thinking about press release services as a method of spreading News (with a capital N) and start thinking about them as a way of sharing information that the greater public needs to hear, you can shift how you approach them.

Let’s say, for example, that your three-man pest control team has been in the biz for a while and they’ve been schooled by some experienced guys who know their subject. They know, for example, that termites hibernate all winter and them swarm first-thing in the springtime, looking for a new place to make a nest. That’s something that the general populace can take advantage of, even though it’s not news.

So they treat their press release service like it’s a PSA release service, and they write a simple blurb about how springtime is the time for termites to swarm, and they tell everyone what to keep an eye out for. They put their name and website link on it, give is to their press release service, and up it goes onto Google News and the whole bit. If they’re smart, they’ll engage local internet marketing tactics and mention their hometown in the article, so that people searching for news about their region will see it (and thus call them).

That kind of public-help material not only gets your business in the news, which is great, but it also builds a positive public-relations spin. The more urgent and the more esoteric the information you have to share with the public, the better the results. Spend an evening brainstorming a few dozen articles that you could send to your SEO company (they have a good relationship with several press release services) and get yourself a headline!

Until just recently, small business SEO was a pretty simple thing: you build some backlinks to your website, research some good keywords that you can easily attach the name of your business’ neighborhood onto, and put those keywords all over your website. In the last several months, however, the game has changed a bit — the search engines have started paying close attention to where your backlinks come from, and it turns out that they really like backlinks from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

That’s the modern small business SEO is all about the social media — one link that comes from a positive review on Facebook or even a “Digg” or other social bookmarking reference means significantly more than the same link from a blog comment or a forum post somewhere.

But it’s easy for a business to fake a link or two from the social media sites — the search engines have a tolerance for 1 or 2 ‘planted’ links. They certainly can’t argue with a dozen or more backlinks to your site from a pile of different social media accounts. That’s why your business should give your employees every chance to say what they think about you on Twitter, on Facebook, on Pinterest — wherever they want to, really.

The best part about the social media world is the power of one positive opinion. All it takes is one person who likes your product or service enough to say so on his Friendfeed, and that can realistically turn into a dozen new customers. Encourage your clients to use social media in addition to whatever your SEO company is doing — just be sure you’ve some kind of incentive to offer them, and you’re golden.

Local markets, even on the Internet, are easier to conquer than the worldwide market. When you ask your website’s SEO company to engage in local internet marketing on your behalf, they’re going to start optimizing your websites for a variety of keywords that have location names in them. Sometimes, these will be the same keywords that apply on a global scale, like switching from “candy bouquets” to “candy bouquets in Tallahassee”. Other times, you’ll be able to broaden the scope of a keyword while focusing it geographically — switching from “candy bouquets” to “bouquets in Tallahassee”.

So is there ever a time when it’s bad for a small business to switch to local internet marketing? Sure, but only one: when you don’t actually have a storefront. Any business that has an address or a front door should engage in LIM as fully as they can. Local internet marketing has two big benefits that make it an obvious choice.

First, local internet marketing is cheaper than global internet marketing. The cost-per-month might be the same, but it will take fewer months to dominate your local keywords than it would have to win over global keywords of the same quality.

Second, global internet marketing isn’t likely to drive a lot of traffic through your doors. It’s just psychology — when people search for “candy bouquets”, they’re just as likely as not to be information seekers, preparing to make their own candy bouquets. But when someone searchers for “candy bouquets in Tallahassee”, they’re clearly looking to go somewhere and buy something — and that’s exactly the kind of customer you want walking through your doors.