Can you help with a few high-level mobile SEO questions?

[akim26]

Rolling out a mobile site for a client and I'm not positive about the following:

1. Do these mobile pages need to be optimized with the same / similar page titles? If we have a product page on the regular site with an optimized title like "Men's Sweaters, Shirts and Ties - Company XYZ", should the mobile version's page have the same title? What if the dev team simply named it "Company XYZ Clothes" and missed the targeted keywords? Does it matter?
2. Along the lines of question 1, isn't there truly just one index and your regular desktop browser version will be used for all ranking factors on both desktop and mobile SERPs?
3. If that regular page indeed ranks well for "men's sweaters" and that term is searched on a mobile device, the visitor will be detected and served up the mobile page version, regardless of its meta tags and authority (say it's on a subdomain, m.example/.com/mens-department/ ), correct?
4. Are meta descriptions necessary for the mobile version? Will the GoogleBot Mobile recognize them or will just the regular version work? Looks like mobile meta descriptions have about 30 less characters.

Thanks in advance. Any advice is appreciated.

• AK

[StephanieChang]

Hi AK,

I've done some work/research for a client who had mobile sites. The responses below are based on these past experiences.

1. It should include the same/similar page titles. However, you should append the word mobile at the end, so that users immediately recognize that this is a mobile site. Ex: "Company XYZ Clothes- Mobile Site"

2. I'm a little unclear about your question, but there is a Googlebot that crawls regular pages and another bot that crawls mobile pages.  The user-agent settings on the server should provide search engines with enough information to specifically use their mobile bots to crawl the sites.  However, to build the authority of the regular sites via the mobile site, add canonical tags on the mobile site that lead to the regular site. This helps tell search engines the preferred location of the URL and pass authority to that site.

3. In theory, yes. However, this is based on the user's mobile device. The issue with mobile rankings is that it is entirely dependent on the user's phone model and this ranking differs phone-by-phone. To help with this, I would suggest creating a mobile sitemap for Google.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648

4. The regular version will work, but it will be helpful to append the word "mobile" in the description and ideally, near the beginning of the meta description.

Smartphones work by using the regular sites, so this only pertains to individuals who use mobile devices that can access the internet, but are not considered smartphones.

Best,

Stephanie

[Hexpress]

I have few concerns about mobile seo.

Pls have a look at here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/want-to-target-mobile-site-for-google-mobile-version-and-desktop-site-for-google-desktop-version

Can I have any response here?