SEO Systematic Guide– 195. How to Make Your Website Mobile Friendly?

One of the reliable statistics says that around 300 million people will be using their mobile devices to access the internet and to surf the web pages by 2010. Though not all industries may expect the same level of mobile users to access their websites using their mobile devices, it is expected that the following industries will have a huge surge of mobile users: Entertainment, Consumer goods, food chains, travel, gaming and financial industries. It does not mean only websites in these industries should try to make efforts to make their websites mobile friendly.
Here are some tips on how you can optimize your website for mobile devices. First of all, you must know that the downloading time in mobile phones is much slower in mobile phones as opposed to the laptop and desktop browsers. Mobile phones have their own limitations. Therefore, you must be highly mindful of the size of the pages. Always go for external css to design your website this will make your pages load fast in the mobile devices.
XHTML is the perfect platform for mobile devices. However, you must make sure that your XHTML codes are perfect because mobile browsers have very little tolerance towards errors.
When you are using CSS, it is recommended that you use two style sheets for your website one for regular browsers and another lighter version for mobile devices. Try not to serve ads to your mobile users as advertisement banners irritate the users when they view your website through mobile devices. You can try the text version for the mobile devices. However, do not make your website too bland; it should still have aesthetically appealing looks.
You must make sure that all the information is accessible easily. All the pages should be accessible in not more than three clicks. Place your navigation menu and links to important pages in the obvious places so that mobile users need not have to scan through the entire page.
You can make use of validation tools such as W3C mobileOK checker. This will give you a clear picture of your website’s mobile friendliness. Your pages should be under 20kb for easy downloading. Do not use JavaScript linking in your navigation menu.
You must keep your web page’s content all together. Avoid unnecessary whitespaces. By keeping all the information together, you will make it easy for your visitors that use mobile devices to access your website. They don’t have to painstakingly scroll up and down the page to read the information.
W3C mobileOK is a free tool and you will be able to learn a lot of things about your website using this free tool. The next time you want to optimize your website for mobile phones, you can use this tool as your starting point.

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