Handset manufacturers and software providers are all champing at the bit in carving out market share for projected mobile apps sales to reach $17bn by 2012. The global appetite for mobile apps will explode over this decade, but what about mobile SEO?
What for many is glaringly obvious, mobile is set to become the primary access point of the internet in this coming decade. But where do we fit in?
In yet another encounter in the big tech wars, this time it’s Apple that titan Google is taking on. Over the past few months Google’s mobile operating system, Android, has debuted on a host of smartphones, which has riled Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs enough to tell his employees: “Make no mistake, Google wants to kill the iPhone.”
Taking this to heart, Apple this month sued Taiwan’s HTC Corp, the maker of touchscreen smartphones using Google software, accusing it of twenty hardware and software patents infringements related to the iPhone.
As if to make matters worse for Mr Jobs, a recent article in TechCrunch confirmed his fears: “I’ve been using the Nexus One with TMobile since mid-December as my primary mobile phone. This is the best Android-powered phone to date. It’s also the fastest and most elegant smartphone on the market today, solidly beating the iPhone in most ways. In this rapidly evolving market there is sure to be something better just around the corner. But if you are looking to buy a high-end smartphone right now, this is the phone for you.”
But what will come of this in a time some prematurely describe as the Year of Mobile? According to Jason Steinberg of ClickZ: “2010 is the year of mobile…Everyone in advertising and media has been hearing that statement for nearly three years running. And for the last two, it’s been followed up with a less than reassuring ‘and this time, we mean it’.”
To back that assessment up, the BBC reported: “…developer activity for the iPhone has risen 185% in advance of the iPad’s April arrival. Applications for the iPhone can be ported over to the new device. We have definitely seen a shift back to the iPhone with the anticipation of the iPad and a little bit of the disappointment with the Nexus 1 (Google phone), Simon Khalaf, chief executive of Flurry Analystics told business site MarketWatch.com.”
Already, Google’s Android Marketplace has more than 30,000 apps made for smartphones running on its mobile operating system. Chetan Sharma Consulting told the BBC that the charging model which dominates the app ecosystem is changing. “Advertising and the sale of virtual goods has helped expand choices for developers and we will see all of that ramp up in the next couple of years.”
And, of course, the possibilities are enormous, with 270 million mobile subscribers in the US alone and with 29.1 million of them smartphone users. And in addition to the high numbers in the US, the majority of users in the developing world are going online for the first time using a this device.
As David B Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School, told the New York Times: “The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility…That has the potential to change the economics of the internet business and to redistribute profits yet again.”
Like many in the industry, Google recognises that more and more people are accessing the web via mobile phones rather than the desktop and has openly stated that the Nexus One represents “the next frontier” in the company’s core business.
There can be no doubt that mobile marketing will play an increasingly important role in the overall marketing mix; from searching on the move to social networking, all platforms will become the new staple of internet search.
Although Apple’s recent legal action against HTC may have wider implications for all phone makers that use Google’s Android operating system, Ian Fogg of Forrester Research said that the case against HTC, in which Apple alleges infringement of 20 of its patents, could be the first of many.
But whatever the current legal wrangles, localized content is what search instantly delivers on these devices, so products or services will increasingly need to be related to a geographic area, if they don’t already, and sites should focus on the keyword phrases that identify the geographic scope of the business.
To emphasise this trend, Google Blog comments: “If you’re like us, you’re constantly looking for things in your neighbourhood, whether it’s [restaurants in zurich] or a new [dentist in houston]. If you specify your location in your query, we often show your results on a map…”
All very interesting, but where does all this leave mobile SEO when results from internet search and mobile internet search appear so indistinct at the moment?
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John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) and an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Mobiles To Change Economics Of The Internet
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Mobiles To Change Economics Of The Internet
Here’s some more stuff you should know about.
- I did a monster-long interview with Eric Enge. I think the interview lasted an hour or something like that, and we covered several areas in depth.
- Next, take a break and go read this post by Rhea Drysdale. Heck, maybe send her a donation by Paypal. Rhea took on a big fight for the benefit of the SEO industry, saw it through to the end — and won! In the process, she earned the sort of credibility that you just can’t buy.
- We continue to answer webmaster questions over on the YouTube webmaster video channel. My recent favorite video is an eight-minute discussion of “What are some good link-building techniques?”
We now have over 200 videos live on the webmaster video channel, including topics such as “Is it worth spending time on tags and categories?”
You might want to check out the video channel; there’s a lot of good material there. You can also follow me or the Google webmaster account on Twitter; we often tweet when new webmaster videos are released.
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More material for web site owners
Google is replacing SearchWiki with stars in Google search. The stars sync with Google Bookmarks, so you can get access to them wherever you go. Once you star something, it shows up above the search results:
Pretty cool. But I discovered an extra little tip. If you go to Google Bookmarks, you can find a bookmarklet that will let you bookmark random pages as you surf. Then you can edit the bookmarks — for example, I added the words “Chrome market share” to three different metrics companies that I check each month:
The cool thing is that if your search matches the text that you added, that bookmark will show up in your search results:
This can be really handy. For example, at the start of every month I do the search [chrome market share] to bring up this blog post I did so that I can find the links to the three metrics services. But now I have those services bookmarked and I can access them right from the search results. Good stuff.
By the way, did you notice that unusual Google logo in the image above? There’s a great Chrome extension that lets you pick a custom Google logo. Right now I’m using the Google logo for the Tapati Rapa Nui festival in Chile. (Full-disclosure: a member of my team, Tiffany Lane, wrote the Chrome extension to change the Google doodle.)
The rest is here:
Google stars for bookmarking
[Just as a reminder: everything below is my personal opinion. I haven't sent it to anyone else at Google for a review, etc.]
Valleywag used a recent podcast I did as material for two points in Six Delusions of Google’s Arrogant Leaders. The two assertions that used my comments as material were “Google’s wealth means Google ‘gets it’” and “Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow.”
Valleywag has either misinterpreted what I said, or I didn’t express myself clearly, because I don’t believe either of those claims. I’ll try to explain the intent of what I said, in case I wasn’t clear during the podcast. I’ll address the latter claim first (“Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow”), because I certainly don’t believe that “Google must sacrifice user privacy to grow.” I think Google benefits the most when users understand what Google is doing and why; I also think that user trust in Google (and by extension our privacy policies) is paramount to our success.
A good example is our Google Ad Preferences page. As one blog concluded a couple days ago: “Google’s Ad Preference Manager, with its persistent opt-out plug-in, offers precisely the kind of robust opt-out that privacy advocates have always demanded.” And it’s not that we’re shy about talking about privacy; Googlers Alma Whitten and Nicole Wong recently talked privacy for an Ars Technica article that came out earlier this week. It’s a long article, but an example useful fact is that if X is the number of people who visit the Ad Preferences page and opt out, 10X people don’t opt out and 4X people actually edit their categories to improve the targeting relevance of the ads they see. Let me say that again: four times as many people change their settings to make their ads *more* relevant than opt out of interest-based targeting. I think the Ad Preferences page is a good example where users get more transparency and control regarding their privacy.
Another example where Google helps your privacy (rather than sacrificing it) is the Google Dashboard. This is a single site that gives you an overview of what information Google has from various services, and allows you to edit and to manage settings. This is another example where Google is trying to give more information to users, not less. I could point out lots of examples where we try to debunk privacy misconceptions. Where we actively fight for our users’ privacy. Or where we talk about privacy and engage in debates about user privacy. And of course there’s Google’s full privacy center (with videos!) at http://www.google.com/privacy.html . Suffice it to say, I don’t believe that Google “must sacrifice user privacy to grow.”
Okay, what about the other claim that Valleywag used me for: “Google’s wealth means Google ‘gets it’”? Ryan Tate wrote “It’s a truly bizarre moment, in which Cutts defends some horrendous management decisions based on Wall Street trades.” I don’t agree with that either, so let me try to clarify. Eric Schmidt joined the company in 2001. The first time I got to meet Eric was at the weekly TGIF meeting where he was introduced to the wider company. He answered questions for an hour, and I thought his answers were spot on. He was one of the original authors of lex, a well-known Unix utility that I had used in the past, so I knew that he was also a solid engineer and technologist. Schmidt also had experience at large companies (Sun and Novell).
All in all, I was very happy and impressed that Eric was joining Google. When I went home that day, my wife asked what had happened at work. And I replied with something like “I think the value of our stock options just went up a lot.” What I meant by that was that I thought Google had recruited the perfect person to lead the company from start-up to the next level. I still believe that. Eric has been a truly great CEO–and I’m not just saying that because for the last several years he has worked for $1 a year. 
Maybe I didn’t tell the anecdote well or clearly, but my intent was to explain that I think Eric Schmidt has been a great CEO right from the beginning of this decade, not to defend any decisions “based on Wall Street trades.”
If you want to listen to the full podcast, it’s available, but I hope this post helps to clarify.
Source:
Clarifying a couple points
In a previous post I covered how to link to a specific timestamp in a YouTube video. The short version looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s
The “#t=31m08s” takes you to 31 minutes and 8 seconds in a video. I just found out that you can also start embedded videos at a certain timestamp.
To do it on an embedded video, use the “start” parameter. Note that start takes seconds as a parameter, not minutes and seconds. For example, to start an embedded video 31 minutes and 8 seconds into a video, 31*60+8 = 1868 seconds, so you would use this code:
<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PjDw3azfZWI&hl=en_US&start=1868"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PjDw3azfZWI&hl=en_US&start=1868" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>
and it would look like this:
That’s all there is to it.
Credit:
Start an embedded YouTube video at a certain timestamp