We'd like to start a series of articles on Mobile SEO, and how piJnz can help get your mobile sites or landing pages optimized for the mobile searches.

First, let's talk about the differences between the PC (desktop) and mobile SEO.

When you publish a mobile website on its own URL (.mobi or m.), you need to be sure that your mobile website does not compete against your regular site in desktop search engine results (unless your regular desktop site is not ranking that well anyway, and you simply want something about you to show up when visitors are looking for your services or products). Or, even worse, Google may mistakenly assume that your desktop site is duplicating the content of your mobile site, and penalize your desktop site by removing it from search results entirely.

So the question is - do you want your m. or .mobi site to come up in desktop search results? If you don't have a desktop site alternative, the answer may be "sure, why not? anything is better than nothing!" - in which case there is nothing special you may need to do to let Google know that your site is a mobile site.

Yet, most of us with an active desktop presence would want to keep our mobile site out of the desktop SERP. What should we do?

First, remember that placing your mobile site on a .mobi or m. domain does not tell Google to treat it as a mobile website. (We had done an experiment with our own mobile site hosted on m.pijnz.mobi URL, and it was successfully coming up in desktop SERP for "piJnz" for months!).

Here are the steps you need to make to let Google know that your website is for the mobile audience only:

1.  If any pages on your mobile website contain a paragraph or more of content copied or syndicated from the desktop site,  then one of your sites (desktop or mobile, or sometimes both) is at risk for duplicate content penalties. Google penalizes you for duplicate content by lowering your rankings or removing you from search results entirely.

Luckily, there is a simple cure for that. All you need to do is place a Link element with rel=canonical attribute (referencing a desktop page)  in the head sections of your mobile pages that contain the duplicate content.

Here is the syntax for that:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page.html" />

To add the link with "rel=canonical" attribute on piJnz, simply open the page in Page Editor, and add the element into the Header HTML Insert box in SEO and Access section on the bottom right:

Add this element to every mobile page that contains some of the duplicate content from the desktop site.

This basically tells Google not to index the mobile page, and to refer to the desktop page instead.

Ideally, you should also put a "rel=alternate" attribute to the corresponding pages on the desktop site:

<link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.example.com/page.html" />

This tells Google that m.example.com/page.html is a corresponding mobile page.

2. Second, you need to generate and submit a mobile sitemap.
While not a requirement, a mobile sitemap is another way to tell Google that the site is a mobile site. A mobile sitemap is similar to the regular sitemap, only it contains an additional < mobile > tag, and references a difference namespace. Here is an example of a mobile sitemap:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
    <url>
        <loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
        <mobile:mobile/>
    </url>
</urlset>

Any mobile sitemap generator tool works, as long as it follows the above format. We've used http://www.madsubmitter.com/mobile-sitemaps/ successfully in the past.

Once you generate your mobile sitemap, you need to save it to your computer and then upload it to the root folder of your mobile website.
To upload your sitemap on piJnz, you simply need to click on the Settings link on the website dashboard, and upload your sitemap there:

Once you've uploaded your sitemap, go to Google Webmaster Tools (you may need to register there if you don't have an account already) and submit your sitemap. It will ask you to verify that you have ownership of the site by asking you to either upload a file to your mobile site or add a verification tag. If you are using piJnz to build your mobile site, pick the Mega Tag Verification method, and then simply copy and paste the meta tag into the same settings window (see screenshot above).

After you submit the mobile site map with Google Webmaster Tools, check the "mobile" section of your sitemap report (this tells you how many pages in your sitemap were detected by Google as mobile-optimized):

Submitting a mobile sitemap tells Google that your website contains mobile-optimized content and should only be included in mobile search results.

(See Mobile SEO Tips - continued)

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Image credit: earthandseed.org