What is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. The objective of Accelerated Mobile Pages is to enable web pages to load faster and therefore get displayed faster on mobile devices.
Most of the web pages today have adapted the mobile friendly option so that their pages are easily accessible when accessed from a mobile device.
On AMP enabled pages, the impact is greater because the pages load faster even on networks that are not high speed ones. Maximum number of searches today happen from mobile devices and Accelerated Mobile Pages project started with the main objective of being able to seamlessly cater to this shift.
While publishers continue to publish their unique content online in the hope that their content will reach the end user, if the network is not geared to handle it, then the effort has no value. Having Accelerated Mobile Pages would mean that pages with media rich content such as, videos, images, animations are easily accessible from a mobile device. AMP would to a large extent address the performance issues with media rich pages so that these pages load faster when being accessed from mobile devices. The other intent of AMP is to ensure that no matter which mobile device is being used; the content should load instantly, without any issues.The focus of AMP at this stage is largely on web pages that publish content on a regular basis and also depend upon Ads for monetization.
What will you need to do in order to create AMP compliant pages?
You may want to refer to this link from Google webmaster forum on AMP in order to learn about creating AMP pages.
There are various benefits to ensuring that your site is compliant
1. As a publisher you are focused on providing content to your visitors that is useful, engaging, and ultimately results in conversions. If your visitor is accessing your page over a network that is slow, they may not be able to view your content and may just leave. This is where having AMP pages will help because the primary objective of this open project is to focus on optimizing the performance of the web pages on mobile devices resulting in superior user experience.
2. There is an interesting way by which this technology is going to be handling the distribution of the content. A news article that gets published now, in any part
of the world, would be available to access instantly across the globe on mobile devices. This is going to be possible by the using a new approach to cache. Essentially, once a webmaster publishes content, it will continue to be hosted on its servers, and in addition the content will get distributed through Google’s global cache server which will enable the content to reach any mobile device instantly.
3. Web pages that have Ads enabled, and are using AMP, will continue with their choice of Ad networks and Ad formats. This open-source initiative ensures that the high speed web pages do not compromise on the Ad formats, and displays, and the transition is smooth for content publishers, advertisers, and users alike.
AMP, SEO, and Rankings
An SEO optimized site such as a news site or sites that publish articles regularly will stand to gain considerably by having AMP installed. Because not only will their articles show up instantly, the Ads on their web pages will continue to be shown on mobile networks without compromising on the Ad formats. Google pays a lot of importance to user experience. With mobile friendly pages being one of the many ranking factors that Google uses, AMP, which by its very definition is designed to create high downloading web pages, and create better user experience, will certainly play an important role in rankings as well.
AMP will continue to evolve by adding more and more features in order to enable high visibility and performance across mobile devices.