One of the points that will be high on the agenda at this year's Online Marketing Show will be that the web has finally graduated from our PC monitors and now exists firmly in the air around us, waiting to be accessed at any given moment. Internet usage on mobile devices is now growing at the rate that was predicted some three or four years ago, making this year definitely, officially, the year of mobile... hooray!
It's not all about mobile. Any number of devices during the next decade and beyond will be able to access the wonders of the Internet, and all of them will need to be able to search and quickly retrieve the information or websites that people are looking for. This is where search engines need to think about how their interfaces and results will work on any number of new devices.
Even on the biggest, prettiest smartphones, Google's search results don't fit on the screen, removing the majority of paid search listings that make up so much of Google's revenue. If everyone were to use mobiles only to search for info, Google might even go bankrupt!
Google has a separate index for mobile devices, so it's not as though they haven't thought about this. But as the web becomes ever more accessible, two questions remain:
1. How will search engines really help users find what they're looking for, especially on the smaller devices?
2. How will they continue to know what are the most important results for natural search?
The second question is particularly important for SEO. So much of what we do boils down to ensuring that the myriad of connections on the internet make it clear that our sites, or our clients' sites, are viewed by the search engines as important. Not only important, but important for specific themes and keywords, and we manage this using techniques on and off the website itself.
See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3640805
It's not all about mobile. Any number of devices during the next decade and beyond will be able to access the wonders of the Internet, and all of them will need to be able to search and quickly retrieve the information or websites that people are looking for. This is where search engines need to think about how their interfaces and results will work on any number of new devices.
Even on the biggest, prettiest smartphones, Google's search results don't fit on the screen, removing the majority of paid search listings that make up so much of Google's revenue. If everyone were to use mobiles only to search for info, Google might even go bankrupt!
Google has a separate index for mobile devices, so it's not as though they haven't thought about this. But as the web becomes ever more accessible, two questions remain:
1. How will search engines really help users find what they're looking for, especially on the smaller devices?
2. How will they continue to know what are the most important results for natural search?
The second question is particularly important for SEO. So much of what we do boils down to ensuring that the myriad of connections on the internet make it clear that our sites, or our clients' sites, are viewed by the search engines as important. Not only important, but important for specific themes and keywords, and we manage this using techniques on and off the website itself.
See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3640805
