SEO Best Practices for Tablet Devices

Matt Crowley - November 29, 2012

With the holiday season in full swing, many people are buying or receiving tablet devices. This raises important questions for businesses that want to abide by search engine optimization best practices in relation to tablet devices.

Google was able to provide some tips on the matter and offer some insight on what they expect to see for websites viewed on a tablet. More information from the Google blog post covering this topic can be found here. The key point they made was that users are expecting to see the desktop version of a website when using a tablet device, not the mobile version. If your website has a mobile version, they would rather have the desktop version be returned to users on tablet devices.

The best practice from a search engine optimization perspective is to develop a responsive website, which will allow seamless transition across all devices. More information on using responsive design can be found in this blog post. The key benefits as mentioned in the previous blog post are:

• Maintaining one URL for your website, regardless of whether it’s being viewed on mobile devices or a desktop, makes it easier for users to respond to calls-to-action on your site, such as a user sharing one of your product pages on their own Facebook page or linking to an article on your website from their own website.

• By eliminating the need for redirects, responsive design enables users to easily navigate back and forth between pages on your site, with minimal load time.

• Googlebot user agents only need to crawl your responsive web design pages once to retrieve your content.

Google also made the point that if your website is using redirects to send mobile device users to a mobile version, they don’t want to see tablet device users being redirected to the mobile version. As always, it is important to follow general SEO best practices as these will ensure your best results from search engine optimization.