It is important to understand that when you are creating a mobile version of your website, you only want to capture the essential data that mobile searchers are looking for.  When people are looking for your website on a mobile device, they are looking for quick information that they need in a hurry.  Include the following on your mobile website:

• Abbreviated home page content
• Simplified contact form
• Phone number
• Map and address
• Main product or service information

Including only the important information will give users of all mobile devices a good user experience, regardless of the type of device.  Even smart phones have their limitations as to what types of content they can display properly.  It is especially important to have a good mobile website if your main site is comprised of Flash technology.  Currently no mobile device has the capability to display flash based websites.  A flash website appears to be broken when viewed on a mobile device, leaving the user with little options to get in contact with you, or view your services or products.

Too many outbound links on a website can deplete a site’s own PageRank (the importance Google assigns to a page based on an automatic calculation that factors in the link structure of the web and many other variables). However, this may be more of a relative than an absolute statement; there are ways to externally link to relevant websites without reducing the importance of your own website.

In its simplest form, PageRank can be explained with this formula:

PR(A)= PR(B) + PR(C) + PR(D)

From the formula above, the sum of the PageRank of pages B, C and D is awarded to page A because all of their links are pointing to A. Basically, pages B, C and D are passing on some of their own “link juice” to Page A.

PageRank is assigned on a page by page basis in that the more outbound links one has on a particular page, the PageRank of the page itself is affected. An intelligent strategy is to create a page on the site that includes a collection of links to websites that your users will find helpful. This is a good idea as externally linking from an internal page on your site as opposed to the homepage will not have that much of an affect on the site as a whole. The homepage typically has the highest PageRank by virtue of the links pointing to it. That PageRank from the homepage flows to the internal pages on the site. So, to keep that healthy internal link structure intact, we’d essentially want to have outbound links coming from a lower level page.

However, all of this can be completely avoided with the nofollow attribute. A few years ago, Google put into action the nofollow attribute so webmasters could link to other websites without losing their own “link juice”. This is useful if a webmaster wants to provide links to other quality websites for their users and not lose their own PageRank status.

Smartphones are becoming more commonplace among mobile phone users these days. People are now relying on them for daily functions such as checking email, running applications and browsing the internet. Most, if not all smartphones come bundled with some sort of web browser. One of the many challenges web developers face is getting mobile websites to render properly amongst the many different mobile web browsers available. A tool that web developers can use to see how their mobile pages will render, prior to implementing in a live environment, is called a mobile emulator.

There are many different mobile emulators, some of which are free, that can be downloaded from the internet. These emulators work fairly well, but I’ve found that they portray a somewhat idealistic view of how certain devices will behave. For example, recently we have begun developing several mobile websites for clients. When a certain website was in the testing phase, we used a variety of different mobile emulators to see how the website would render on the multitude of mobile devices available. One specific device that we tested for was a BlackBerry. The emulator displayed the site just as we intended, but we noticed after we rolled out the site and started testing it on the actual devices that some BlackBerry devices would not render the website properly. After a lot of head-scratching and research, we found that the default settings for some BlackBerry devices turned off critical browser functions, such as CSS and tables, in order to speed up download time. Once we made the necessary settings on the BlackBerry device, the page rendered as intended.

There is still a lot of trial and error when it comes to mobile development. What we have learned, is not to rely so much on mobile emulators, but rather use them as only one part of the testing phase. Of course, you can’t test your mobile websites on all the actual mobile devices available, but in time, you will learn the various nuances of the most widely used ones, so that you can then explain to your clients how to get the most out of their mobile browser.