How To Make Your Website More Mobile-Friendly For Google

In today’s world of Smartphone’s, tablets, and various other devices for mobile connectivity, it is essential for people who search the web that the content they are searching for is displayed properly. Have you ever loaded a page on your phone only to be disappointed when you are unable to see it correctly? Mobile accessibility is becoming more important every day, and businesses who have not upgraded to platforms that support mobile devices are falling far behind the pack. Google has in fact issued warnings to site owners whose pages do not meet their requirements for mobile accessibility.

Why Does A Search Engine Care About The Design Of A Site?

Certain search engines become more popular over others because they return a higher rate of quality results to searchers. An obvious indicator of whether or not the results are quality is how relevant the search terms are to the site, and the numbers of other sources that have inbound links. This is no doubt important, but perhaps even more important is the experience a user has when they click on the link. If you have ever been stuck on sites with unreadable content then you will easily understand the importance of this.

Google understands the value of user experience and how important it is to be able to navigate easily through a site using a mobile device. In order to retain their share of the market they are determined to provide visitors with the best experience while searching possible. The more times that a link is clicked, the higher it will show up in search results.

Making A Mobile-Friendly Website

If you are uncertain whether or not your website is friendly to mobile devices, Google supplies a test tool for checking the mobile-friendliness of a site for free. It locates the issues and problems that may be stopping your site from displaying properly and explains how to fix them.

If you need to switch your site so that it is more mobile-friendly for visitors, there are several options that you can choose, depending on how old your site is and whether it was developed on a CMS system like Drupal or WordPress.

•    If your site is run using CMS, check to see if there is a module or plugin for achieving a mobile layout. As an example, WordPress comes complete with the plugin that they named WPTouch. It uses an alternative mobile theme to serve the site.

•    Direct your visitors to an alternative site for traffic using mobile devices. Although this can be expensive to build and maintain, it has the potential to offer the best interface.

•    The possibility exists for newer sites to be retrofitted with changes to the HTML code and the use of a new CSS3 style sheet. This would enable the site to have a responsive design that would automatically resize content so that it displays properly on mobile devices.

•    Redesign the site by utilizing responsive design framework such as 960 Grid System or Bootstrap.

The value of having accessible content available to mobile users will quickly become noticeable. It makes sense as an investment as well so that you will never lose sales, no matter what device the buyer is using.