Website Mobile Friendly Guidelines from Google

Google has recently published a set of guidelines and documents on “How to make your website mobile friendly”.

I think this is one of the best of the many initiatives from Google to make lives easier for so many. A growing population of users today are accessing websites from their mobile device and  it has not be a very pleasant experience for them so far. There are far too many slow, and mobile unfriendly sites that make browsing from mobile device a painful experience.

As an added incentive Google is going to display the mobile friendly label next to the sites that are mobile friendly.

Here are some steps that will help your website come close to achieving the “mobile  friendly” status:-

1. To begin with you can run a quick “Mobile friendly” test by going to this URL: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?utm_source=wmc-blog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mobile-friendly

2. A detailed guidance from Google on how to make your website user friendly is available here:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/?utm_source=wmc-blog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mobile-friendly

3. Google Webmaster tool has a “Mobile usability” section under “Search traffic”. This will show you the errors when anyone accesses your site from a mobile device.

4. The detailed guidance from Google also includes help in optimizing websites for mobile friendliness when using third party software like Word press.

 For more details you can check out the official Google webmaster central blog : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2014/11/helping-users-find-mobile-friendly-pages.html

As far as SEO goes, webmasters will need to take into consideration various other factors when implementing SEO best practices for optimizing for mobile devices. Even though the fundamentals of the best practices will remain the same, the application and implementation may differ.

In the meantime, you may want to check out this post to ensure that users can access your site from their mobile device this holiday season.