With the evolution of mobile devices and mobile search, there’s already been a steady shift in SEO techniques to help keep Websites relevant in search engines, but a new industry-agnostic emphasis on location is again changing the face of SEO and re-writing the rules once again.

Location-based social media from the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla and numerous others have placed heavy emphasis on location information, and as search engines index that information, more weight is placed on location than anything else, especially now that it’s been revealed that nearly one-third of mobile searches have a local intent.  Still, how does this effect SEO?

In an excellent post on PromotionWorld.com, a site was referenced in saying apps like Foursquare are “making it way easier for searchers to find great deals from their mobile phones, kicking up the need for excellent SEO services geared towards mobile search.”  The same site revealed interesting statistics that looked at business profile pages indexed in Google over the past 24 hours,  coming from the following sources:

• Yellowpages.com: 219
• Superpages.com: 553
• Yelp.com: 928
• Foursquare.com: 11,300

Continue Reading

The death of Michael Jackson nearly stalled the world wide web.

Unlike anything seen in recent memory, entertainment and social networking websites experienced near crashes and exploding servers as a result of millions of hits that congested web traffic to an unprecedented extent.

The mobile web in particular was tested like never before and came through shining on the other side.

Even before Michael Jackson’s death was confirmed, celebrities took to Twitter to comment on a day of celebrity death (first Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson). Throughout the evening, other celebrities tweeted to similarly express their reactions to the King of Pop’s death at the age of 50.

Several pranksters then released false stories on Twitter about Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum also dying today in freak accidents. None were true. But all caused such a flurry of mobile web searches that the internet as a whole had to fire on all cylinders to keep up. Continue Reading

A Bango study released this week, revealed that half of the Top 20 most trafficked PC websites (according to Nielsen Online) did not work well when visited from a mobile phone. The study noted that some of the sites that did not work well had a mobile version of their site, but when the study’s users went directly to the computer version of the site they were not directed to the mobile version.

If you have a mobile site then make sure your PC site detects a mobile device and presents the made-for mobile version.

That used to be easier said than done. Fortunately there is a free online file generator which enables webmasters to create a meta.txt file of their site. This file contains all the information necessary to help a visitor to your site get to the right version of your site. The meta.txt file is the brainchild of Visibility Mobile, a mobile search engine optimization firm offering services and tools to brands, search engines and mobile agencies. Continue Reading

If you’re interested Mobile Monday is coming to New York in a couple of weeks. A bunch of mobile geeks are gonna get together and grok mobile, seo style.

Their agenda sounds like it could turn out to be pretty interesting. I hope they’ll put the audio up on the Mobile Monday NY Blog (pretty please). Google will have a representative there. I wonder where Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask are? They should be there too, all three of these companies operate mobile sites and should be backing the mobile community.