Google has recently announced, as well as launched, its new mobile first index. The emergence of mobile search has come to dominate SEO and social media marketing of late and will continue to do so well into the future. Google announced that it has launched their new mobile first index and is beta testing it at a handful of specifically chosen sites.
Google has released several tips and strategies to ensure that your site will be where it needs to be:
- First, of course, is to make sure that your website has already been prepared for mobile with responsive design and that the content you are posting is of the highest possible quality. This includes everything from text to images to your videos. They must display and play properly on mobile deices or no one will stay longer than a few seconds. Can you afford that?
- Make sure that the URL’s of your structured data are working flawlessly for both the mobile version of your site as well as the desktop and laptop version. Your structured data is critical to your success with regard to the search parameters and features that are most used by potential visitors to your site. This also goes for all of your metadata. Make sure that meta tags and descriptions are pretty much the same across all versions.
- If you are running various URL’s right now for your mobile and desktop sites, it may be easier to consolidate. Although, Google advises that no changes may be necessary but you should visit this strategy to ensure that you are where you need to be. You can’t afford any mistakes. You can’t afford to lose traffic.
- The crawl rate for your site may get a significant boost. Because of this, you need to be working closely with whoever handles your servers to ensure that they will have the capacity to handle it. This is especially true for a separate host situation. If you are currently using responsive design and dynamic serving, you should be fine but, again, best to review everything and make those changes where they need to be made.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
