That said, there are some companies who should have started creating mobile content years ago, and are extremely late to the party. I mentioned a few of these in my SES Chicago presentation on Monetizing Mobile Search late last year. To find out if your brand should be investing heavily in mobile today, or simply creating a basic mobile user experience, use these three free tools.

Google Mobile Keyword Tool

One of the things I hear most in the mobile industry is “no one searches for a __ on their phone”. In the past, this claim wasn�t really verifiable, as keyword tools like the kind marketers use to promote desktop content weren�t available for mobile-specific queries. Jumptap changed this with their mobile keyword tool, and when it disappeared late last year, Google replaced it not long after with the Google mobile keyword tool. The great thing about these tools is that they give marketers data to support or trump the HIPPO. You may have heard that mobile search doesn�t apply to your industry, or to B2B specifically, or you may have heard that no one searches for a washing machine from their phone; but with the Google mobile keyword tool you can clearly see that there are 14,800 monthly global searches that include the phrase �consulting�, 135,000 that contain the phrase �management�, 201,000 that include �business� and 8,100 that contain �washer�. Many times in marketing, perceptions are guided by assumptions rather than data, and the Google mobile keyword tool can help marketers get a better understanding of what their consumers are looking for in the mobile space. If the value of a visitor or conversion is known, the Google mobile keyword tool can help make a solid business case for the right degree of mobile involvement.

PercentMobile

I had done a post on mobile analytics some time ago, and a few things have changed in the space since then. One of the recent changes is in reducing mobile analytics to its simplest form, which is done beautifully by a service called PercentMobile. The genius of PercentMobile is that it is, according to founder David Harper,”designed to answer one question, ‘What is your percent mobile?’”, or what is the percent of mobile visitors that comes to your site? It’s difficult sometimes to get this number from traditional web analytics, as there are a variety of tracking issues for feature phones, and even from mobile analytics, as many of these services measure mobile traffic only and not as a percentage of your overall traffic. If your PercentMobile is high, it may be an indicator that you need to invest in learning more about those visitors through mobile analytics, conversion optimization or keyword research in order to more effectively message to them and convert them.

The PercentMobile for this blog is 3.4%, which is a bit too high since I have a mobile site that I’d rather have mobile users access. I might use this info to improve my mobile redirect strategy and implement server side redirects to mobile users. Your situation may be more like the case of FourSquare, whose founders implemented a Blackberry App because their usage from Blackberries was exceptionally high.

Whatever your conversion recommendation, the first step toward improvement is in discovering your mobile marketing potential through PercentMobile. The service is still in beta, but readers of this blog can use the code ecosystem when they sign up for early access.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics has a few problems when it comes to feature phone tracking, but if you track your desktop traffic with it already, it�s easy to see more information about your smartphone users. In the Advanced Segmentation beta filter, select visits from iPhones to get a better sense of which of your users is visiting on the go. If you want to see more mobile users, use this regular expression to filter by screen resolution. Not an ideal solution for mobile analytics, but a simple one that everyone with Google Analytics can implement with ease.

Now that you have the data to create better mobile content, go forth and create profitable mobile content. The “year of mobile” is waiting.

1. Block your mobile site from Googlebot

The idea behind this recommendation is one that makes sense in desktop SEO, where duplicate content issues abound. In desktop SEO, if you have two sites with the same content, and you don�t identify one site as the canonical site that should receive all of the link popularity, Google will identify one site as canonical and suppress the other one.� �If all of your marketing efforts go into promoting the suppressed one, you�re fighting an uphill battle to make it visible, as Google is promoting the other one. The best practice in desktop SEO is to identify the canonical site with the canonical link element and/or permanent redirects, and block the duplicate content through robots.txt, noindex nofollow or some other means. Some consultants apply this same logic to the mobile world and come to the conclusion that only one version of a site should be in the mobile index and only one version of a site should be in the desktop index.

The reason why this is harmful in mobile is that a different dynamic is often present in mobile search than desktop search. Mobile search engines like Google return mobile sites in desktop results when appropriate, and desktop results are the default for most smartphones. Mobile sites are not suppressed, but oftentimes appear alongside of desktop results, giving brands an additional listing on the page for navigational brand searches. If a webmaster blocks one version of the site from the index, particularly in Google, this will result in one less listing in the mobile search results; and one less listing in a condensed, more competitive mobile search result could make the brand less visible.

This is also emblematic of another, larger issue in mobile SEO: allowing a mobile-formatted version of your desktop site to be your brand�s only mobile presence. �If you didn�t invest in mobile at all, you could let users go to a transcoded or unoptimized version of your desktop site, which may not be usable on a mobile device but would probably show up in search results for certain desktop queries. But if you wanted to optimize your site for search you should be doing mobile-specific keyword research, paying attention to the mobile user experience and including content that is of primary interest to mobile users, which is probably not available on your desktop site. Add value to the mobile user, control mobile signals like sitemaps, domains/subdomains, content-type et al and leave the delivery to the engines for the most natural search visibility.

Another reason I�m surprised many mobile SEO consultants recommend this is that Google specifically addresses it in the mobile webmaster guidelines:

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can and cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot-Mobile or Googlebot crawler.

When it comes to mobile accessibility and white hat SEO, it’s best to ignore the commonly argued worst practice and follow these associated Mobile SEO best practices:

1. Don�t block your mobile site from Googlebot and your desktop site from Googlebot mobile
2. Don�t make your mobile site exactly the same as your desktop site, but smaller. Consider the unique mobile context and build a mobile user experience that adds value to a mobile user, using the queries mobile users will use.

2. You don’t need a mobile site

I explained this one in detail earlier at Search Engine Land, but the notion persists regardless. The idea behind this is that in an iPhone-centric world, search engines often return desktop results to mobile users. Those who would say that you don�t need a mobile site are usually cognizant of this fact and take it to mean that a mobile site represents the past rather than the post-iPhone present and future. Yet when it comes to mobile ranking, many search engines prefer the mobile-optimized content and will rank it ahead of desktop results when that content is available.

At Searchology 2009 Search Quality Engineer Scott Huffman echoed his colleague Ankit Gupta and explained Google�s tendency to do this in detail in his discussion of blended mobile ranking (emphasis is mine):

Another element of complete that of course is one of Google�s tenets is that we want to let you search the whole web, and in the mobile world the whole web is more than just the whole web that we normally think of. There�s another web, if you like, that we call the mobile web. And all I mean by the mobile web is sites and pages that are really optimized and made for mobile devices, right? Things you probably don�t want to return very prominently on the desktop but they�re very important results in mobile search. In the US you get things like CNN and other prominent sites where what they�ve done is taken their, typically taken their desktop site and made a nice mobile rendering of it for mobile users. In places like Japan and China, in fact, you have a very large mobile Web of sites like mixi and a lot of others that are either primarily used in a mobile paradigm or use case or are, in some cases, only available on mobile devices, and so of course it�s very important for us to use those to return those results properly when people are searching for mobile.

I�m not going to try to read all of these queries to you or anything but in these screenshots the red results are mobile optimized results from the mobile web and the blue are web, kind of normal web results that typically users on most devices in Japan would see through a transcoded view when they click on it. And my only point with this slide is just to say that you see all the way arranged from at one side queries where there are a lot of good mobile results and so of course our bias in some sense is to kind of return those when they�re available and give you the good easy to use mobile things when they�re there but of course because the desktop web is much bigger a lot of times there aren�t as many good results in the mobile web and so in those cases we�ll return almost all or in some cases all desktop web results to you.

So, yes, they return desktop results to mobile users, but they prefer mobile-optimized results. If there were a number of well-optimized mobile sites available for a particular mobile query, it�s unlikely that any desktop results would appear, and the question of whether or not brands need a mobile site might look very different. Therefore, when I answer the question of whether or not brands who wish to be competitive need a mobile site for a client it is with a resounding yes. Of course it�s necessary to ensure that your mobile content adds value beyond your desktop site, but in general for the past several years mobile optimization has been nearly synonymous with mobile content creation. If you create a well-optimized mobile site, an accessible desktop site and mobile app(s), you will be more visible in search results than a company that only makes an accessible desktop site.

As optimizers, I think it�s our duty to educate our clients on what will help them be more visible than their competition, and not just help them save money. To that end I recommend that they take what they might hear from some mobile SEO consultants with a grain of salt, and follow this best practice instead:

1. Mobile optimization is mobile content creation. If you�re trying to target mobile users, search engines like Google will reward you for providing mobile-specific content.

Hopefully this post helps clarify the situation, and helps explain why these commonly argued mobile SEO best practices are not actually best at all.

Actually, Matt hasn’t yet discussed mobile search ranking factors to my knowledge, though he has discussed the mobile search opportunity in 2009 many times in various interviews. This can change, however, if democracy is not against me, and if you also want to see him speak about SEO for mobile users for a change.

The Google Webmaster Channel on YouTube is one of the most interesting things happening in SEO right now, in no small part because of Matt’s Grab Bag, which is a Q&A session where Matt answers webmaster questions on YouTube. As head of Web Spam for Google, Matt has been the unofficial unelected leader of the white hat SEO community for several years now, and he’s currently using Google Moderator to take questions from webmasters and SEOs. People in the community can vote them up or down, and if they make it to the top of the list, Matt will address them on camera, giving Google’s official stance on popular SEO issues.

The problem with this is that there are many different types of SEOs, and many of them still don’t understand why they should be concerned with reaching mobile users through search. You and I know that mobile search is outpacing desktop search, to the point where Eric Schmidt has predicted that it will become the primary search mode in a matter of years, “not decades”�, and that Google ranks mobile sites ahead of desktop results for queries that they’ve identified as mobile. We also have a basic idea of Google’s best practices for mobile webmasters. What we don’t know exactly is the types of things that Google considers most important for webmasters and mobile webmasters to be thinking about when it comes to mobile SEO.

If you want to know, please join me in asking Matt on Google Moderator. �If you want to see Matt’s take on our mobile-specific niche of SEO, please use the checkmark to vote the question to the top of the list.

I’m thinking many of you may have the same concerns, as I’m seeing an increase in searches to this site related to the tool. For you, here’s a quick walkthrough to help �locate the new home of the Google mobile keyword tool:

1. As before, drill down to your mobile ad group in your mobile campaign.

2. Select “Add Keywords”

3. Bypass the input box and select keyword tool to the right.

4. Mobile keyword tool appears, with results tailored to mobile searches.

The tool has the same functionality as the old tool, but it’s in a different place. Hope this helps a few of you locate it, if you were having trouble.

Transcript of Scott Huffman on Mobile Search at Google Searchology 2009

Mountain View, California, May 12, 2009

Transcribed by Bryson Meunier from live video at http://investor.shareholder.com/media/eventdetail.cfm?eventid=68846&CompanyID=GOOGPR&e=1&mediaKey=E739CC1B5640E66235B0EEBBB424B1E1

Copyright Google, 2009

Hi everyone, I�m Scott Huffman I�m an engineering director here in Search Quality in Google and today I�m going to be talking about mobile search quality.

So we�ve heard some things about all the things that you�ve come to expect from search from Google. All the great things like it�s fast it�s relevant it�s comprehensive it�s fresh it knows what you really mean when you type in the search box so of course the starting point for us in mobile search is that you should expect all those same great things on your mobile device.

And so that�s what we�re trying to accomplish. So� great. Big deal, right?

So what�s so interesting about mobile besides that it�s kind of got a smaller screen? So as I thought about that a few things came to mind.

One that you�re probably all aware of is that mobile search is growing incredibly quickly, and we see it growing faster than search from PCs in fact. So it�s really quickly becoming kind of a primary way that people access the internet and access search in some parts of the world growing incredibly fast so that by itself makes it interesting.

Second thing that makes it interesting for my team in particular is we think of as kind of the challenge of devices .so the reality is that I think the desktop guys actually kind of have it easy, right? I mean, okay there�s some different browsers. I get that. They�re different, ok. But like, you�ve got a screen this big [motions with arms to indicate larger screen] those browsers all at least do kind of the main things pretty well. On the mobile world it�s not like that. So we have hundreds of devices literally that we support with Google mobile search and in fact those devices have radically different capabilities all the way from kind of high end devices that have webkit browsers, full javascript capabilities, css, all that good stuff all the way down to the low end where you�ve got devices that don�t really have full browsers, don�t support any of those good things, and in some cases even have hard limits on the number of bytes that they can download on a page so maybe kind of a side effect of that and just another general property of mobile search is that in fact we think search on the mobile device is kind of harder to use than it is on the desktop, right? The keys are really small, sometimes there aren�t keys at all. It�s hard to enter queries and so we�ve spent a lot of time thinking about �how can we optimize search to make it easier on the mobile device?�

And then the third thing that�s kind of inherently interesting about mobile is that it�s local, right? It�s in my pocket, it�s in my hand, it�s wherever I am, and obviously we think Google should be able to use that to get me more relevant results when it makes sense. So the way to kind of roll it up for us is our dream that we kind of talk about all the time in the mobile search team at Google is that we�d like to get mobile search to the point where it�s really a daily engagement kind of activity, right? That rather than going to find their laptop, find their desktop in order to do a search that people will feel very comfortable and natural pulling a mobile device out of their pocket and using it. We�re not quite there today and we think there are really three key elements that will get us there.

One is that we think mobile search needs to be complete, right? It�s got to have all the great things of Google but really optimized and beautifully working for my device. Secondly it�s got to be easy. I talked a second ago that it�s hard and we�ve got to get to the place where it�s really effortless and natural to do a search and to get the results I need. And the third that it�s local, right? That it knows where I am, that it does the right thing.

So I want to talk about those three areas and I�m going to start with complete to describe some of the things that we�ve been doing recently in the mobile search world.

So one thing that we spend a lot of time on is really trying to optimize the search experience for the different kinds of devices that there are. Here you see a series of kind of the most recent Android devices and you see a bunch of different elements of Google search. Sort of looks like what you see on the desktop but in fact there are a lot of subtle differences if you look closely. So starting from the Google suggest screen here naturally we want to use suggest to make it easier to type on the mobile device so as you start typing those suggestions pop up. And in fact one thing that happens on a mobile device is that as soon as you start typing the search box slides itself slants itself up against the top of the screen to give you enough room to show as many suggestions as possible and really try to kind of increase the hit rate on getting you the suggestions that you need.

The next screenshot over shows Google universal search, and here you see some� again it looks kind of like the desktop but you see a bunch of differences. For example you see a big button with the phone number, right? So we�re really trying to just make the use case which we see a lot of, of click to call a business very easy very effortless on a mobile device. You see a big button for get directions which actually pops you straight into the Google mobile maps application. And if you look closely there�s actually a lot of other differences between this screen that you get in mobile versus the desktop screen.

The third one you see here is Google image search. This is a version of image search that we launched about two months ago. And here we�ve really tried to optimize for kind of the touch screen nature of some of the devices, right? So you see kind of a tight grid of images when you tap on an image you drill through and get kind of a larger view, some details about the image. And then in fact you can use the swipe mechanism to kind of scroll through the images�something you can�t do on desktop, but something that�s very natural from users of these devices in terms of the typical way that they interact with images and photos and that kind of thing.

And then the fourth screenshot is Google�s product search. This is something we released about two weeks ago, and a really nice rendering of product search if I do say so. And here we�ve used a UI paradigm that�s almost a little more like an application feel. So once you get your search results and you tap through to get the details of a product in fact you can go layers in and get to the details that you need deeper and deeper as you can go in and get the technical specs of their camera let�s say or the detailed reviews and that type of thing.

So that�s one element of complete. Another element of complete that of course is one of Google�s tenets is that we want to let you search the whole web, and in the mobile world the whole web is more than just the whole web that we normally think of. There�s another web, if you like, that we call the mobile web. And all I mean by the mobile web is sites and pages that are really optimized and made for mobile devices, right? Things you probably don�t want to return very prominently on the desktop but they�re very important results in mobile search. In the US you get things like CNN and other prominent sites where what they�ve done is taken their, typically taken their desktop site and made a nice mobile rendering of it for mobile users. In places like Japan and China, in fact, you have a very large mobile Web of sites like mixi and a lot of others that are either primarily used in a mobile paradigm or use case or are, in some cases, only available on mobile devices, and so of course it�s very important for us to use those to return those results properly when people are searching for mobile.

So here�s a picture of that. I�m not going to try to read all of these queries to you or anything but in these screenshots the red results are mobile optimized results from the mobile web and the blue are web, kind of normal web results that typically users on most devices in Japan would see through a transcoded view when they click on it. And my only point with this slide is just to say that you see all the way arranged from at one side queries where there are a lot of good mobile results and so of course our bias in some sense is to kind of return those when they�re available and give you the good easy to use mobile things when they�re there but of course because the desktop web is much bigger a lot of times there aren�t as many good results in the mobile web and so in those cases we�ll return almost all or in some cases all desktop web results to you.

So I had two more areas, easy and local, and for these I want to go ahead and give demos, so if you could switch to the laptop and let me just set this demo up.

So I recently got to take a trip to London– it was a very nice trip. So I hope I get to go back, and if I get to go back I�ll do what I always do, which is I�ll pull out my ticket and I�ll look at my flight number, let�s pretend it�s this one. And then I�ll check it out and I�ll see with the box at the top that, lucky me, my flight is actually on time, which is great. Then I�ll do probably what I always do, which is I�ll take my ticket and I�ll stuff it deep inside some bag somewhere, and then I�ll kind of forget where it is. And then as I drive up or take the taxi up to the airport I�ll be thinking I wonder if my flight�s still on time or if I have time to get some coffee at the airport and unfortunately my ticket will be pretty far away from me. Let�s go ahead and bring up the demo here.

[trying to make the mobile device screen as visible as possible on the projector].

Ok great. So here I�ve got Google search up, and I tap on the search box, and lo and behold, magically, there�s my query, ba 284. This is a feature that isn�t quite released yet. We�re going to have it out in the next few weeks. Very simple idea, right? So then I can tap on this and see that presumably my flight is still on time. There it is. Very simple idea, sharing the queries between my desktop environment, search environment and my mobile environment. We think it�s just one simple example of kind of the power we can get when we�re going across the desktop and across mobile search. So that�s a feature we�re very excited about.

The last demo I want to show you here (let�s just see if I can get this to come up here� alright. See how this one looks.)� So for the last demo here I want to show you an example of kind of local and easy together. What I have here is the Google mobile App, this is on the Blackberry device. So this is our search application that we provide for this device. And you can see at the bottom here that it�s picked up my location being in Mountain View, California, and in fact, from the device�s GPS it�s actually picked up my location basically sort of around here. And so as I start typing, right? [begins typing sushi] of course we get Google Suggest coming up (where�s the Google suggest, there it is) but in fact when I get to something that looks inherently local like sushi what we�re suggesting back isn�t just some queries but in fact is the closest sushi place to campus here. So we�ve taken location, passed it down through the search stack and actually brought that straight back as a suggestion for me. And then if I click on this, you see I get some options to go ahead and call these guys and make a reservation, to see some more information about them on the web, or to pop the maps application and see a map, and again just an example of trying to make it easy to use a mobile device and integrate my location in it.

That�s it for me. I think next Marissa�s going to come up and talk about some more new things in search. Thanks. [applause]

Google classifies a websites as mobile enabled based on certain signals like page layout, markups used, etc.�When a user searches for “Mobile” websites only, only if the website is classified as Mobile websites by Google, it will show up. When a user searches for “Everything”,�Google blends mobile websites with regular desktop websites. Mobile websites get a boost if certain quality metrics hold

A few observations:

• The list is made up mostly of popular apps and developers of the apps, most of which are listed according to the application name or developer name, and not according to the query used to find them.
• Seems to be fresh content, as some of the apps are brand new
• Free is the most frequently used keyword, followed by lite
• In some cases (e.g. bible, drinking games (free), sudoku (free), dog whistler) no specific app is mentioned.

This list will likely change as the most popular app list changes, but marketers looking to understand what users are looking for in the App Store can use search suggest to help them get there.

App Store Search Suggest Keywords for Friday April 24, 2009

aim (free edition)

archers: bowman’s battle free

awesome ball

amazing x-ray fx^2 lite

aol

action bowling free

aroundme

arcade bowling� lite

atomic fart free (funny, prank, joke, game and much more!)

aol radio

bubblewrap

backgrounds

babelgum

blackjack free

3d brick breaker revolution free

beer pong challenge

batter up baseball� lite

bible

catcha mouse

crazy penguin catapult free

compass free

cube runner

the weather channel�

digital chocolate, inc.

the game creators

chillingo ltd

codify ab

cbs sports mobile

dictionary.com – dictionary & thesaurus

draughts free

dog whistler

dictionary.com

dots free

directv

drinking games free

deal or no deal: million dollar mission lite

dow jones & company, inc.

enormego

google earth

ebay mobile

epicforce

eyetricks

electronic arts

exploding spec

espn cameraman

epocrates

ebay inc.

f-mylife

sudoku (free)

facebook

flood-it!

flashlight

ferrari gt evolution: lite version

flipside5, inc.

free translator

finger sprint free

fuzz friend

galaga remix lite

google mobile app

google

the godfather

gameloft

mini golf 99 holes theme park free

girl wars (girls only!)

gunapp

heat pad – relaxing heat sensitive surface

touch hockey: fs5 (free)

hangman.

free hangman

john haney software

how to videos from howcast.com

huffingtonpost.com

high gloss

haunted

have2eat

idare

ihandy level free

ifighter lite

iguerilla lite

imob 15 respect points

ibowl

imob 40 respect points

I sniper lite

ihandysoft inc.

iheart radio

jonathan johnson and brian pratt

jellycar

jirbo, inc.

john e. hartzog

junpei wada

joost

john moffett

jared judd

kingdoms live – free for limited time

kindle for iphone

kanondrum

kazuho okui

kronos games

koi pond

knots

kevin calderone

keyvisuals

konami digital entertainment

labyrinth lite edition

lightsaber unleashed

lose it!

labpixies

racing live – free for limited time

lie detector advanced (free)

live poker by zynga

movies

myspace mobile

mobilityware

mood sense lite

mafia wars by zynga

mazefinger

yahoo! messenger

namco networks america inc.

ninjas

nba game time

ngmoco, inc.

nytimes

nba digital

night stand

nine inch nails

newton’s cradle classic

next mobile web

odasoft

optime software

orsome

ocarina

tap of war free

opentable

bank of america – mobile banking

bounce on lite

the oregon trail

pandora radio

pac-man lite

padadaz

playmesh

pandora media, inc.

pocket god

papijump

paper football by jirbo

public radio tuner

quickvoice recorder w/free voicemail

quetouch.com

andy qua

quicktip

q continuum

quick tap reflex -free

qq

quip

quick graph

pop quiz!

remote

removem (free)

ringtone recorder free ringtones

race wars san francisco

race wars

rbz apps

skype

shazam

sol free solitaire

shotgun free

storm8

skyworks

stickwars

sgn

stylem media

tap tap revenge 2

tap tap revenge

tapulous

tic-tac-touch: fs5 (free)

textfree lite

twitterfon

urbanspoon

wordsearch unlimited lite

usa today

units

undead live! Vampire werewolf overlord

uniwar

ustream viewing application

zombieville usa lite

virtual zippo� lighter

virtuesoft.com

vegas pool sharks lite

vampires live – free for limited time

vlingo – voice app

vault breaker full free

volkswagon polo challenge 3d

voicenotes

virtual villagers 2 lite

virtual villagers 2: the lost children

wsj – the wall street journal

word scramble by zynga

wings for cats

who wants to be a millionaire lite

whiteboard: collaborative drawing

webartisan

the weather channel interactive

webworks and applications

xcube lite

xbox achievement guide

xpressed

xtreme labs inc.

xcube labs

inside xbox 360

1337pwn xbox live friends application

amazing x-ray fx^2 pro

x-plane 9

yahoo!

yelp

yudo inc.

y! music

yellow pages

ypmobile

youniversal ideas

yo mama for a buck

yowza!!

zynga

the zumobi network

zombieville usa

zombie attack! Free

zintin

zentomino lite

zipcodes

zhdict

So, as they say in the states (and especially at poker games in the states), put up or shut up. I give to you MobileSEO.info, the Mobile SEO Wiki. Please make it useful for others if you can. If you can’t, please don’t post your irrelevant links programmatically, as they will be deleted if they’re published at all.

�

With the help of Shinji, I have posted basic info as a springboard for other contributors, but the more contributions the merrier. Questions on publishing edits, please let me know.

An interesting way to find top YouTube searches that I didn�t cover in my presentation, hower: enter the keyword video in the keyword tool.

When I did it I found that 35% of the keywords that came up were also listed in the Hitwise report from December 2008 on YouTube searches. It seemed as though YouTube suggest keywords were returned in order of greatest search volume when I described how to do YouTube keyword research with the suggestion tool in May of last year. This seems to confirm that keywords are returned in terms of relative search volume in the YouTube keyword research tool as well.


Top YouTube keywords according to Hitwise, December 2008 data and the YouTube keyword suggestion tool:

How to Add this Site to Your Google Preferred Sites
1. While logged in to your Google Account, visit the Google Experimental Search page.
2. Select Join this experiment in the My preferred sites section.
   
   
3. Select Add preferred sites to go directly to your Google Preferences.
   
   
4. Add brysonmeunier.com and other sites you trust to the input box and select Add Site.
   
   
5. Save preferences.

How to Vote for this Content in Google�s SearchWiki
1. While logged in to your Google account, search on mobile SEO or some other keyword for which this site appears on the first results page.
2. Click on the upturned arrow to the right of this site�s listing in order to promote the result.
   
   

Other Methods


Linking is still a very important signal that Google uses to understand the relevance of a page to a query. Linking to this blog with the anchor text Natural Search and Mobile SEO Blog instead of BrysonMeunier.com can help return this site more often in your natural search results for relevant terms.

Don�t forget, you can get this content directly when it comes out by subscribing to the blog feed, or following me on Twitter. If you haven�t yet signed up, try it out for more great information on natural search and mobile SEO.

Thanks to John Fairley of Forward Leap for the tip. QR codes have been popular in Asia for a while, but this is the first time to my knowledge that a major search provider in the states has been promoting them. They�re a unique, easy way to tie online and offline marketing efforts together, and they could have mobile search implications as mobile signals, just as links are off-page signals web search engines use today.


As for the new mobile version of this blog, I wanted to upgrade v 1.0, which had been put together in June of last year as a simple exercise, but never fully optimized or regularly updated. At present I haven�t found a mobile content creator that will allow me to control all of the signals that I�d like to for mobile search, so I�ve created this static site based on the site templates for smartphones that dotMobi provided over two years ago. This is preferable to most site creators, as it allows me to provide mobile specific content along with desktop content reformatted for mobile.


More on mobile site creators in a future guide. For now, know that some are better than others and one may be right for your mobile content project.


If you access this blog on your mobile device, please let me know what you think of the new site. It�s not the sexiest of mobile web sites, I�m sure, but it does what it is supposed to do and is more findable than most. This is a soft launch, so your feedback is much appreciated.


Readers of this blog should know that I am domain agnostic when it comes to site addresses, so in addition to the smart code, the site can also be found at the following addresses, and always accessed at the top navigation of my desktop site:

BrysonMeunier.mobi

m.BrysonMeunier.com

Bryson.mobi

wap.BrysonMeunier.com

Mobile.BrysonMeunier.com

MobileSearchOptimization.mobi

MobileSearchEngineOptimization.mobi

I don�t usually post about what�s going on in the search industry because I�ve historically been client-focused, but as I start to speak at more conferences, meet with more SEOs of all types at the monthly Chicago SEO Meetup and write more articles on search, I�m noticing how obvious it is that there are people in this industry who seem to do something completely different than I do, and whose opinions on search seem almost entirely irrelevant as a result. Oddly these are some of the most popular SEOs in the industry. On the other hand, I�m honored to have met many in this industry whom I respect a great deal, and whom I have become a better marketer as a result of reading or speaking with.


To illustrate, and to promote the kind of example that I think is worth promoting, I want to highlight two discussions about brands that happened just recently.

The first discussion most people in the industry are familiar with: Aaron Wall�s reported Google update in which Google is preferential to brands on a large scale. I wrote why I disagreed with it on the FindResolution blog on Friday, and participated in a related discussion on Sphinn. The crux of the argument was that Google made a large scale update similar to Florida, but bigger, and that the update was preferential to �branding�. Matt Cutts mentioned on Sphinn that they did change the algorithm for certain queries, but denied a large-scale update. I mentioned some examples, along with Danny Sullivan and Vanessa Fox, that didn�t fit neatly into this theory, and said that I didn�t agree there was a large scale update, and that brands might be appearing in results more often because brands do SEO. The conversation around it was vague and unstructured, the responses were generally irrelevant if they were given, logical fallacy of argument from authority was used to justify a fallacious argument, and many SEOs started at the conclusion that the theory was right before examining the evidence for it. When I mentioned some of these things on Sphinn, the responses were generally childish ad hominem attacks, responses that were ignorant of what had already been written or loose justifications for an algorithm change or some lesser point that the original post did not argue. At the end of the day, it became obvious to me that there wasn�t much of a discussion happening, and that some people were not looking for the scientific method or analysis because they were already believers in the authority of the speaker, and weren�t interested in anything that fell outside of that belief. I must say, that if I thought this was the only face of our industry, I would be busy trying to find another job.


Fortunately, another conversation about brands got me rethinking my career change. Search Insider Gord Hotchkiss, whom I was fortunate enough to meet at SMX West, talked in his column about brands as well, but did a few things that Wall didn�t do:

1. He used the scientific method when forming a hypothesis, and defined very clearly what he meant by brand. He listed the Wikipedia definition and he explained how he was speaking of it, specifically. This is important because with the Wikipedia definition of brands, Aaron Wall�s post would have meant that Google was doing a large scale update to be preferential to just about anyone. It seemed in context that he meant big brands versus small, but he never defined how big a big brand has to be to qualify, or how small. By defining his terms off the bat, Gord makes his argument clearer and stronger.
   
   
   Wall generally didn�t follow the scientific method at all in his post, as he skipped the first step and the last step, and didn�t draw conclusions based on the evidence, but stuck with the hypothesis in spite of data that didn�t fit in.
   
   
   Here�s the scientific method for those who need a refresher:
   
   1. Define the question
   2. Gather information and resources (observe)
   3. Form hypothesis
   4. Perform experiment and collect data
   5. Analyze data
   6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
   7. Publish results
   8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

   
   

   It�s true, SEO is not rocket science, but I agree with Rand Fishkin that sticking to the scientific method more often when making hypotheses would increase professionalism in this industry, and help us all have more informed discussions and reach better conclusions.
   

2. Another thing that Gord did was ask a question that made a bold statement, rather than make a bold statement that didn�t hold up to questions.
   I know that many SEOs like Aaron Wall do what they do because it gets them inbound links, but to me it�s the difference between yellow journalism and Pulitzer Prize winning journalism, or between the Jonas Brothers and Mozart. It may make them popular, but it doesn�t mean that it holds up to scrutiny. And if it doesn�t hold up to scrutiny in the short-term, it�s unlikely to lead to long-term popularity.
   Better, in my mind, to take a more Socratic approach, and try to solve problems by asking questions until you get to hard truths.
   Gord does this by asking the question �Can brands keep their promise in a digital world?� and then proposes two potential ways in which brands might be able to keep their promise. It doesn�t make what he says any less authoritative, as it�s clear he�s an authority by having the foresight to ask the big questions, but it�s a different approach that tends to appeal to a different audience.
   
   
   There�s a book called Leading with Questions that argues the best businessmen are those who ask pointed questions rather than make bold authoritative statements. I would argue the same is true of the best businessmen who practice SEO.




3. Gord�s answer to his question didn�t focus on toolbar PageRank, reverse engineering or gaming the system in order to make fast money because he�s a different type of marketer. In my experience his columns are generally forward-thinking in that they recognize the challenges all brands face in marketing to a brave new digital world. And they focus on long-term brand impact of these challenges rather than short term gains from loopholes that don’t focus on relevance. The answer to the problem facing brands, Gord suggests, is to pay attention to mobile and social media. This method probably isn�t going to get anyone fast disposable traffic and help them work at home, but it is a problem that brands are going to have to solve sooner than later if they want to remain relevant to their consumers.



Aaron Wall�s supporters call him �the Professor�, and this may be the case. But I think he uses different methods than the professors that I follow, and he may be teaching a different class. The professors that I follow use the scientific method to form hypotheses, they focus on long term brand impact and how brands can succeed in a changing digital media landscape, and they ask pointed questions rather than pose grand theories. There�s room for all search engine marketers to follow this example, but right now I think only a few do it exceptionally well. Unfortunately those who do are not necessarily the most popular, but I would argue that they�re the best.


In order to tip the scale a bit, and alert people to the professors that I have consistently learned from since beginning my SEO education in 2001, I�ve listed a few of these teachers below. This list is by no means complete, and should include about everyone at Resolution Media, where I�ve had the pleasure to focus on SEO for brands of all shapes and sizes since August of 2005. It’s also focused on SEO, and doesn’t include my many friends in the mobile industry.



listed alphabetically


Jeremiah Andrick, Microsoft

Jonathan Ashton, Agency.com

John Battelle, Federated Media

David Berkowitz, 360i

Jeff Campbell, Resolution Media

Vint Cerf, Google

Matt Cutts, Google

Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz

Vanessa Fox, Nine By Blue

Aaron Goldman, Resolution Media

Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro

Avanash Kaushik, Google

Lance Neuhauser, Resolution Media

Paul O�Brien, Zvents

Steve Rubel, Edelman

Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land

Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land, Local Mobile Search

Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

Eric Ward, Search Engine Land

My first article went up today and asks the question “Has the iPhone Made Mobile SEO Obsolete?” If you’re a regular reader of this blog I’m sure you can guess what my answer is, but it’s an important argument to make since people have been answering this question in the affirmative since I began doing mobile SEO in 2005. If you like it, Sphinn it, Digg it, do your worst.

This will be a monthly mobile search column in Search Engine Land, beginning next month. To get the latest updates, subscribe to my article feed on my author page.

One addition to the article. I included 4 examples of search engine research that indicate that mobile search behavior and desktop search behavior are different, but only two of the links were included in the article. These are the four that I listed if anyone’s interested in all:

• Deciphering Mobile Search Patterns: A Study of Yahoo! Mobile Search Queries
• A Large Scale Study of Wireless Search Behavior:
  Google Mobile Search
• Find.mobi: Mobile Search – What People Are Looking For
• Mobile search is not online search (and why that matters)

First, the tip: if
you have a captive audience waiting for a movie to start staring at
the time in the glow of their unused smartphones, don�t show
them a URL that they have to wait to get home to access. Instead,
encourage them to access the site right there in the theater from
their unused phones. By doing so you extend the time your intended
audience is able to engage with your ad campaign, and the value of
the investment in the theater ad. There were a number of URLs that I
saw in the theater, but now that I�m home I can�t
remember any of them. The one URL I tried to access from the theater
was for a desktop site I couldn�t access from my Blackberry
that I can�t remember the URL for. NCM.com maybe? MCN? Who
knows. It didn’t work on my phone when I tried to access it, and I’m not going to try again.

Give these bored
people something to do and they will be happy to follow you to mobile
content.

Now to the show. The
idea is, the mobile searchers pick the winners through the volume in
Google�s new keyword tool, and we�ll see how the results
measure up.

The mobile searchers
had that one right. Let�s see how they do during the rest of
the show. Stay tuned�

Winner: Kate Winslet, The Reader

Winner: Sean Penn, Milk

Best Picture

Best Director

Best Picture Winner:
Slumdog Millionaire

Best Director
Winner: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire

2 out of 5 right probably indicates that mobile search volume is better at predicting who searchers think is sexy or newsworthy than who members of the academy believe is worthy of being celebrated. Nonetheless, another good year for movies, and for movie-related mobile searches. Congratulations to Slumdog Millionaire, and all the nominees at last night’s Academy Awards.