The rise of the smartphone has brought mobile web design into the spotlight. A couple of years ago, just about everybody checked out websites on a full-sized PC, but more and more people these days browse the web on their phones. That means your business needs a website that is fully optimised for mobile search and browsing.

Ask your web designer to test your existing website on all the popular mobile browsers. You need consider how to optimise it both for search and usability, just as you would for a traditional website.

Submit your site

Both Google and Yahoo! have created mobile versions of their site map applications. Submitting your mobile website means the mobile versions of the search engines are aware of its existence and you are more likely to appear in users’ mobile search results.

Watch those URLs

If you’re transferring content from your regular website make sure that all of the relevant URLs are adapted for the mobile market if you wish to be included in mobile search. Most search engines will only index relevant URLs, i.e. those that are configured for mobile browsing.

Configuration is key

When the mobile web bots start crawling your site, they will penalise any site that is configured incorrectly.  Some mobile websites can be difficult to index, therefore most major search engines have separate mobile crawlers. To optimise your mobile website for search make sure that all user-agents, including mobile ones, are allowed to access your site.

The general principles of SEO apply to mobile websites just as to traditional websites: design them in a way that is SEO-friendly, and adhere to the established best practices of the major search engines.

The mobile web has been the subject of debate for a few years with predications of its growth and usage, but this year looks set to be the year where the it finally becomes mainstream. The technologies required to display websites on mobiles are now here and as they become more varied and affordable, the way in which we search and use the web is surely going to change.

With the emergence of devices like the iphone and Blackberry which use direct user manipulation with the screen, this has allowed screen sizes to be maximised, allowing users to see a lot more data. This is a big advantage for designers. The way in which people appear to be using the mobile web seems to be based very much more on practical functionality, communication, and accessing data/carrying out tasks quickly on the move. In this respect and with the challenge of designing for a smaller screen, its clear that mobile interfaces must be designed with content and usability at the forefront, whilst still conveying a companies branding and image successfully. Some mobile sites which demonstrate successful examples of this stripped down design, content focused approach are Amazon and Twitter.

The interface possibilities associated with phones also open new opportunities for designing the best user experience. Built in features like touchscreen, the mobile keypad, accelerator keys, the iphones motion detection and even vibrate could be used to maximise the efficiency of accessing mobile data. The type of sites that have proved most popular among web users support this idea of a more functionality and content focused web. News, weather and sports sites, email, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and of course search engines all rank very highly.

The statistics for mobile use in Britain are also interesting with Britain making up 20% of worldwide mobile web usage, second only to America. The number of mobile internet users grew from 5.8 million to 7.3 million is the third quarter of 2008 according to research from Neilson Online, meaning the mobile web is growing 8 times faster than desktop. The result of this rapid increase in mobile web usage has taken many businesses by surprise and are unaware that a large amount of their potential market are now surfing the web via mobile. In 2009 I think that many companies will start to see the advantage of having a mobile version of their site – not as a replacement but as a peripheral part of their overall brand strategy, allowing them to maximise their exposure to their markets.

As mentioned, social networking and the ability to update accounts like Twitter, Facebook and blogs, on the move and improve communication plays a big part in the mobile web and web in general. At a seminar we attended last week, one of the speakers Joe Hughes from Yomego suggested the theory that in the future social networking will take a more focuses approach where users in certain communities will have their own social networking and communication sites to discuss their interests, hence allowing advertisers to be more focuses aswell. Whether or not this happens to the extent he suggested is debatable, but the web definitely looks set to continue to embrace this social and community aspect of communication and generating content and the role the mobile web plays in this will continue to increase.