Highly skilled SEOs are always looking for new ways to make links more powerful, helping websites get better search engine placement. Creating a network of mobile websites to compliment the traditional web may just be one way that has been more or less overlooked.

Don’t worry too much if you know nothing about building a mobile website, because for many reasons it may be considered less complicated than developing a complex website for the legacy Internet. It is something you should consider doing now, before everyone else in your business niche figures out how powerful it can be to have a network of high traffic sites on the mobile web.

There are several different ways and different theories on how to approach mobile websites and the mobile web. The old guard believes that the Internet should be “device neutral”, and there is another group that think mobile phones, PDAs, and other wireless devices should have a unique approach in the way websites are designed for mobile consumption. There is validity to both views, and the central theme is that mobile websites should be smaller information sites that can download fast to save time and network resources.

Don’t worry too much about this debate, and simply get started somehow with building a small site that can be viewed easily on mobile devices and indexed easily on the mobile search engines. Just know for now that Google has decided that a mobile site will be indexed separately from a regular website, which means there may be some opportunities when it comes to mobile search engine optimisation and the future of marketing to mobile users.

An interesting fact is that Google indicates they will still serve up a version of traditional websites when a mobile browser is detected. This is part of the same controversy of having to deal with a full-blown website on your mobile phone versus a light-weight version with smaller pages designed to favour text over graphics. Some critics have compared this to be like reading a book with a magnifying glass and having to scroll all over the place to see anything on a smaller screen.

Another option, if you are a WordPress user, is to utilise some of the popular plugins that will detect what kind of browser visitors to your website are using, and then the correct view of your web pages will be displayed (WordPress Mobile Pack, MobilePress). These are simple and useful tools but probably will not provide any of the extra SEO advantages of being able to index what otherwise might be considered duplicate content. This is why buying a separate domain name for use on the mobile web, and then building only a few pages of essential information may be smart. You can create a CNAME record for mdot (m.), or register a TLD dot Mobi (.mobi). These are recognised as being mobile-friendly URLs. Winksite.com and Mobify.me are two online services you can use to build a mobile site for free. These are pretty intuitive “point-and-click” online solutions that will work as a start, and also get you in the habit of thinking smaller for mobile sites.

Depending on your approach, from there, your SEO efforts can duplicate some of what you already do online, or it can take on some new characteristics unique to the mobile web like adding QR codes. Needless to say, you will want to build backlinks, but you may have to find some new ways and experiment along the way to see what gets you the best results. Favourites here will still be social bookmarks, forum and blog comments, and submission to mobile web directories and mobile search engines.

RSS feeds are a great way to promote online, and this is a shortfall for what you will see currently offered for mobile sites. You can use RSS to promote mobile sites, but you won’t normally find these feeds as a built-in feature like in WordPress. In most instances, you will have to create your own RSS feed using one of the RSS conversion sites like Feedage.com. RSS compliments the mobile web since it is simple in concept and light-weight when it comes to computer code. Remember to submit your mobile site feeds to RSS directories and be sure to use tags that favour words indicating it is a mobile website.

It seems that even though the mobile web has been around for a few years now, for some reason it can still be considered a sleeping dragon. This makes it even more exciting since there is still plenty of time to learn the ropes and become more-or-less an expert in the area of mobile website marketing before everyone else figures out what is going on.

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