Programming the Mobile Web

Chapter 14. Distribution and Social Web 2.0

So, you’ve finished your mobile web application and you are ready to go to market (or so you think). However, your work isn’t over yet. In this chapter, we are going to analyze some search engine optimization tips, and talk about how to get users to actually visit our mobile websites and encourage them to come back again and again.

We will also explore how to monetize mobile websites using advertising and how to merge our applications with some social features, such as SMS, RSS, and social networks.

Mobile SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a set of best practices that you can follow to allow your website to be in the best possible place in a search engine.

In general, typical desktop SEO techniques apply to mobile websites, too, but some extra care must be taken. As we’ve already discussed, generating too much code (metadata) and too much text for keyword crawling is not the best solution for the mobile web.

The first thing we need to understand is that mobile search users are not the same as desktop search users. Mobile users are typically searching for something very specific, and we should do our best to facilitate access to those resources.

Mobile search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) localize the search results, so if your service is location-based, you should make sure that your location is properly defined in your text and code. In mobile search engines, the user only types a few characters and the engine tries to suggest ...