For those of you who don’t know much about Resolution Media, I’ve been here for five years in August, and it’s really a great company to work for, in my estimation. Learn more about our current positions here:

Had a great time at SMX West last year and am happy to report that I will be speaking there again this year. This time I’ll be talking about Mobile search apps and their effect on SEO and SEM. Great topic among many and I’m happy to be a part of it.

If you’re kicking around the idea of attending, be sure to read Danny Sullivan’s Why You Should Attend SMX West before you register.

As always, if you’re attending, speaking or exhibiting, be sure to say hello at the show!

Thanks to the judges for nominating a post of mine again this year:

http://www.semmys.org/2010/analytics-all-2010-nominees/

Big changes coming for this blog in 2010. �Stay tuned for more details.

If you’re planning to attend, please stop by after the session and say hello.

http://www.meetup.com/chicago-seo/calendar/11732725/

Thanks to Bob Tripathi and SEMPO Chicago for inviting our members to participate! Great opportunity to peek under the hood of the new Google Analytics features.

This week they’ve arrived. According to the Google Analytics blog, Google Analytics will soon be able to track mobile devices and applications by adding a server side code snippet to a page. Great news for mobile marketers and SEOs on Google Analytics who have been holding out for a mobile analytics solution that was integrated with their desktop analytics.

The expanded reporting hasn’t appeard in my Google Analytics yet, but when it does I will have more information on how to use Google Analytics to get insight into mobile users.

First show on Google Adsense for smartphones is available now as a free podcast on the Mobile Presence site. You can also become a fan of the show on its Facebook page.

Have you tried the new beta keyword tool within AdWords yet? Kudos to Google for simplifying the process of finding mobile search volume, turning a four step process into two steps. Once you’ve accessed the beta keyword tool, select Mobile Search within the Advanced options to base your targeted monthly search volume on mobile searches in the country you specify.

It would be nice to see what percent of search volume is mobile and what is desktop to highlight the keywords that will be most effective in mobile search, but this is definitely an improvement in what is currently the only mobile keyword tool available.

Job Description:

Resolution Media (www.ResolutionMedia.com) is a leading Search Engine Marketing firm with offices in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and over 80 employees. With experience in Pay-Per-Click and Natural Search engine marketing & content optimization, Resolution Media connects clients� brand to their audience based on web searches. Our client portfolio includes LeapFrog, Lowe�s, FedEx, Hertz, Universal Orlando Resort, and XM Satellite Radio among others. Resolution Media is an Omnicom Media Group company.

Resolution Media is experiencing rapid growth and seeking a talented Content Coordinator on our Content Solutions/Natural Search team. The Content Solutions team has many different opportunities to work with emerging media like mobile, video, social media and online PR alongside our core area of expertise in Natural Search Solutions.

Reporting to a Supervisor, this entry-level position will be responsible for ensuring that all SEO deliverables are executed on time and of a high quality. This position provides a �training ground� to learn natural search engine marketing, with a primary focus on execution for the first 3-6 months and a growing opportunity to work on more advanced natural search engine projects and responsibilities over the first year.

Specific Responsibilities Include:

Natural Search Research & Implementation (50%):

# Conduct Natural Search Research
# Create client-bound research and execution documents
# Research and implement linking strategies
# Implement various SEO initiatives
# Create monthly, quarterly and ad-hoc reports per client�s business specs
# Conduct and implement multiple page-level optimizations per client�s business needs
# Identify SEO opportunities for Web sites of Fortune 100 companies

Software Usage:

# Experience working with Microsoft Office products
# Solid Excel/spreadsheet capabilities
# Knowledge of campaign tracking software a plus, but not required

Perform various duties as assigned

Qualified candidates will possess a Bachelors degree in marketing, advertising or communications, MIS or stats and 1+ years of work experience.

This person will also:

# Be a proactive self-starter
# Be a team player
# Possess a desire to work for a fast-paced, results-based company
# Have strong time management and organizational skills being able to manage multiple
# projects at once
# Be confident in analyzing and acting on marketing data

APPLY TODAY!
We�re looking for the best and brightest, so take the next step and send us your cover letter and resume. Health benefits, 401k, Discount Stock Purchase Plan, etc. are available.

As some of you know, I had a new addition to the family a week ago when our son Casey joined us. As a result of that and continued dedication to client work I haven’t had much time to update my personal blog or write for other publications. This light posting will be short-lived, as mobile marketing and SEO is more exciting than ever these days and I have a few posts in the hopper. Until then, please join me and others interested in natural search and mobile SEO at this blog’s Facebook fan page, where we can discuss issues in mobile SEO and learn from each other about what works and what doesn’t in SEO for mobile users et al.

Thanks as always for reading, and supporting the Natural Search and Mobile SEO Blog!

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]