Starting with the infamous mobilegeddon update in 2015 and extending to today, mobile-friendly content has been a huge focus for websites everywhere.
Ignoring mobile optimization isn’t just a bad idea for SEO reasons, it can also cause your site to lose countless sales. Don’t worry, though. It’s not hard to make some improvements today.
Whether it’s simple changes or complex technical adjustments, here are five ways you can enhance, organize and format your content so it looks great on mobile devices and provides a solid user experience all around:
• Limit (or eliminate) pop-ups
People on mobile devices are far more finicky than those on desktops. As a mobile user myself, I know that I’m always in a hurry trying to find what I need quickly on the go. On smartphones, pop-ups can be a huge mistake if they aren’t done correctly.
On a desktop, it’s usually readily apparent how to close a window that appears, but this isn’t always the case on mobile. Google has said in an official announcement that these mobile ads, known as “interstitials,” will be penalized if they damage the user experience.
Things that are required by law, like age validation pop-ups, won’t hurt your rank, but annoying interruptions that seek to grab an email address or sell a product will hurt your SEO. Avoid covering the main content while the user is on the page.
[RELATED: Attend the PR and Media Relations Summit in NYC and find what it takes to produce better brand journalism.]
• Use percentages for width
If you have a mobile-friendly theme, something like this should already be in place, but it’s good to know either way. When you’re using CSS style sheets on a page, you can specify the width of elements like columns or images based on either pixels or a percentage.
As an example, if you set the width to 50 percent, it will make the width half of the screen size that’s accessing the page. This ensures that your users won’t have to scroll horizontally, which is extremely annoying.
If you choose to set the width based on pixels, the width of the elements won’t change with the screen size, in which case you could end up with the wrong size on certain devices. That being said, you can use pixel size if you’re also using media queries.
• Make your site mobile responsive with queries
Media queries can make your website responsive to mobile devices, but they’re not for beginners. These are techniques used in CSS coding that allow you to not only change things like width but also the shape of the content and the surrounding elements.
Many professional WordPress themes for creating a blog will have this kind of responsiveness in place, but you can get a little more flexibility if you use these types of queries. To break them down a little more, you can think of these things as ways to give your site the ability to stretch or shrink based on the device being used to access it. These queries can also be used to change how large or small text is as well, giving you the ability to tailor the mobile experience with a high degree of control.
• Get distractions out of the way
You want your users to access your content quickly and easily. To reach this goal, you should ensure they are not being assaulted by too many elements at once. This is especially true if these elements load at different speeds, causing the page to jump around on mobile devices.
A perfect example of something that can go is the sidebar. In a mobile setting, this element is relegated to the bottom of the page. The aforementioned media queries can be used to remove elements like this when the screen is smaller.
• Look to the future
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) are something Google has been championing, and they look to be the future of mobile content if Google has its way. These pages have a specific framework that improves speed and provides a much smoother user experience overall. You can get similar results with heavy optimizations, but this provides an easy and accessible way to make your content super mobile friendly.
Future concepts like this will help you stay ahead of the curve. Google is already displaying AMPs in search results. Check out this guide on how to make AMP pages to get started. In the meantime, stay on the lookout for other innovations like this one.
Mobile devices are the preferred way to access content online. As a result, big organizations like Google are taking notice. How do you keep your content optimized for mobile users? Let us know in the comments!
Erika Montgomery is the chief executive of Three Girls Media. A version of this article originally appeared on the agency’s blog.(Image via)
from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/2mt3uLx
No comments:
Post a Comment