A few ground rules:

Any links you get need to be from pages that are already indexed. Links from non-indexed pages will not help your PageRank. This is per search engine.

Links from highly ranked pages are worth more than links from poorly ranked pages. This is what it means to say that a link is a high “quality” link. High quality, high value links are good. Low quality links are not as good.

Links from sites related to yours are more valuable than links from non-related sites. This is not a personal opinion of Google’s. Search engines don’t have opinons, but there is a contextual relationship between related sites that Google would be silly to ignore.

Low quality links from unrelated sites are still links. That is, the number of links pointing to your site is every bit as important as the quality of those links. Of course, you will need quite a few low quality links to equal the punch and the PR of one good, high quality link, but I wouldn’t look a gift link in the mouth.

When creating link text remember to include keywords related to the target page. “Click here” doesn’t contribute to PageRank as much as “Keyword here” does because search engines (and people) will get a better idea of what is on the other side of that link if it contains descriptive text. You won’t always have complete control over what your links will say or what they will look like. You will be working with other webmasters who may have strict rules concerning outbound links. They may even be too lax in that regard, but do your best to control your links as best you can.

One way to control your links is to provide a “Link to Us” page on your site. Provide the complete html code for the link so any visitor to your site who would like to link to you can simply copy and paste the code directly into their site.

Also, be vigilant and keep track of who is linking to you. There are several tools available on the web which can show you who is linking to you. Use them. Don’t be afraid to ask for changes when you see a link that could be better, and don’t be afraid to ask for the removal of a link if you feel that it may be hazardous to your PR (this should only happen in the rare case that you find yourself linked to a site that is known to be infected with malware or spam).

NOTE: Beware of canonical issues [link to upcoming post here]. Canonical issues occur when a search engine has indexed both the non-www version of your site and the www version. Google considers example.com and www.example.com to be two separate sites with duplicate content. This essentially splits your PR between two sites and hurts your position in the SERPs. Channeling all your links to one or the other will instantly affect the PR of one or the other. So, choose which version you would like to use and then be consistent when backlinking. (This may or may not require a 301 redirect to let the search engines know which version they should be using.)

How to get links

As I said in a previous post about the importance of increasing your PageRank to stay on top of your competitors, there are several approaches to link building. Which ones you use and when is a measure of how aggressive your link-building campaign will be. Not every approach will work for you, but find what works and start there. The amount of time, money, and effort involved is entirely up to you, because these strategies run the full range from free and easy to not quite so free and easy.

Ask around…

This is probably the first and the easiest thing you can do. Ask everyone you know who has a website to consider adding your link to their site. Friends, family, even your cousin’s friends may have a place on their site for an extra link or two.

And not just personal acquaintances but business associates as well–employees, groups and associations you belong to, companies you do business with, clients, social networks, etc.

Ask your employees to mention your company in their travels around the web. Some employees might be using social networking software such as Facebook, et al and blogging. Maybe they will mention who they work for and mention your website.

Belong to any groups or clubs? Do they have a website? Are you selling someone else’s products on your site? Maybe the product manufacturer will link to you. Are you on someone else’s client list? On a website? That’s good. Ask to be a “featured client.”

Join search directories

This could be an important next step in your link building campaign. Beyond search engines such as Google and Yahoo! which index millions and billions of web pages, there are other engines which index sites by category or product type. These are smaller and more focused. Several of these “specialty” directories exist on the web. There are directories specifically for blogs, for restaurants, hotels, storage facilities, and more. Find one that suits you and submit your url.

Search “add url”

A simple method for finding sites to link to yours is to search any search engine for the phrase “add url”. Any sites which allow or encourage you to add your url to a list will most likely use the phrase “add your url here” or simply “add url”. You can also try “add a link”, “suggest url”, “suggest a link”, “suggest a site”, “add a site”, etc.

Of course, that phrase alone is too broad. You would prefer to find sites that are related to yours, so search for “add url” + “clothing” if you own a clothing site or “add your site” + “zoology” if your site is about zoology. Google will return any web page that contains the word “zoology” and the phrase “add your site”. That’s just what you want.

This method is simple and a good way to get links, but links you get in this manner probably won’t be of very high quality. Look out for link farms and scams (I wouldn’t pay for links like these), but remember that a link is a link is a link. I am of the opinion that “link farms” will not negatively affect your site’s ranking, they just won’t increase it very much (if at all). If “link farms” could hurt you, then anyone could easily destroy your site’s ranking by simply adding your url to a bunch of bad sites. That’s illogical. This is still a good way to get lots of links, and lots of links is good no matter where they come from. We all want high quality links from pages with huge PageRanks, and if you have the resources you should definitely concentrate on getting high quality links, but in the meantime I wouldn’t look a gift link in the mouth just because it was free and easy to get. Lots of lower quality links will add up eventually and every link helps. They may even bring traffic, if not PR. Google Maps and Yahoo! Local are perfect examples of this. Just get your site out there.

If this sounds tedious, you don’t have to do it by hand. Several programs will scour the web for appropriate sites and auto submit forms for you. A search for “free link building software” on Google will return several options for you to try. SEO Elite comes highly recommended. It’s well worth the money ($167) considering all it can do. You can get a free trial from their website.

Press releases, announcement sites, newletters

Depending on the nature of your service or product these might be good options for you. If you feel you’ve got something especially unique, a well written press release could be just the thing to create a buzz. How about an official “announcement”? Press release distribution services and announcement sites exist in all price ranges.

You may not have thought about writing a newsletter. Maybe you don’t consider the fact that you have a website “news”. So, create some news. Offer a new product or a special deal that’s only good for a limited time. Did you lower your prices? That’s news. Did you get a press release published somewhere? That’s news. Take the time to write a newsletter, solicit subscribers, and distribute it. It may start a conversation about your site, generate a buzz, bring traffic. If you don’t have a newsletter, try to get mentioned in someone else’s newsletter. That works, too.

Find competitor’s links

Several “link popularity” tools and techniques exist for finding out who is linking to your competitors and for analyzing those links. Chances are, if a site is willing to link to your competitor, they might be willing to link to you as well. For that matter, you should always be on the look out for sites that may be appropriate places for you to promote your site.

When you find an appropriate site, the next step is to ask the webmaster or site owner to link to you. Do this in an informal email. Sell yourself the way you would to any partner. Offer a reciprocal link. One way links are better, of course. That is, convincing someone to link to you simply because it would be in their interest or their custmomer’s interest would be great, but don’t be afraid to offer a reciprocal link when appropriate. You can even link to them first, then send them an email informing them that you have linked to their site, and ask for a link in return. Again, you don’t have to do any of this by hand. Several software programs are available which will automate the tasks of link building for you, from finding relevant sites, to analyzing backlinks, to filling out and sending forms and emails to site owners and webmasters. These are invaluable when it comes to keeping track of all your link building efforts (so you know where your links are, the age and the PageRank of said links, what they say, how they perform, who you’ve contacted, who’s contacted you, etc., etc.).

Social networking

Search engines love blogs. Start a blog, participate in blogs. Be a blogger. This is an ever popular way to get your url scattered about the web. Unfortunately, everyone knows it and so many blogs won’t let you leave a link, or they instruct the search engines not to consider any outgoing links in their ranking algorithms (yes, you can do that). If you own a blog, you may need to take steps to prevent people from participating simply for the chance to leave their link behind. Some less scrupulous site owners use “auto-bloggers” just for that purpose.

The social area of the web is growing all the time. MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, etc. No need for me to get into all of it here. Suffice it to say that Social Media Optimization (SMO) has become a branch of marketing all its own.

Buy links

It is possible to simply pay for links. Countless services exist on the web for this purpose, in all price ranges. You can buy links with a specific PR, in a specific category, one way or two way, with term limits or without.

Think of link building as simply another way to advertise. Use the same advertising dollars you would spend on banner ads and pay-per-click ads, and the like. And don’t neglect offline (multimedia and print) advertising as another way to advertise your site and generate interest. Print ads could very well lead to inbound links on the web.

Link building can be as big a project as you make it. The more aggressive you are in your link building campaign, the more links you will get. It’s that’s simple. High quality links are worth money because they will increase your PageRank. That’s a fact. Money spent on purchasing links with PR 4 or higher (for example) are worth the money and possibly all you need, depending on your goals and your competition. Any marketing service you use to promote your site should offer link building as way to optimize your site, place better in the search engines, promote your product, and raise your traffic and sales.

A few ground rules:

Any links you get need to be from pages that are already indexed. Links from non-indexed pages will not help your PageRank. This is per search engine.

Links from highly ranked pages are worth more than links from poorly ranked pages. This is what it means to say that a link is a high “quality” link. High quality, high value links are good. Low quality links are not as good.

Links from sites related to yours are more valuable than links from non-related sites. This is not a personal opinion of Google’s. Search engines don’t have opinons, but there is a contextual relationship between related sites that Google would be silly to ignore.

Low quality links from unrelated sites are still links. That is, the number of links pointing to your site is every bit as important as the quality of those links. Of course, you will need quite a few low quality links to equal the punch and the PR of one good, high quality link, but I wouldn’t look a gift link in the mouth.

When creating link text remember to include keywords related to the target page. “Click here” doesn’t contribute to PageRank as much as “Keyword here” does because search engines (and people) will get a better idea of what is on the other side of that link if it contains descriptive text. You won’t always have complete control over what your links will say or what they will look like. You will be working with other webmasters who may have strict rules concerning outbound links. They may even be too lax in that regard, but do your best to control your links as best you can.

One way to control your links is to provide a “Link to Us” page on your site. Provide the complete html code for the link so any visitor to your site who would like to link to you can simply copy and paste the code directly into their site.

Also, be vigilant and keep track of who is linking to you. There are several tools available on the web which can show you who is linking to you. Use them. Don’t be afraid to ask for changes when you see a link that could be better, and don’t be afraid to ask for the removal of a link if you feel that it may be hazardous to your PR (this should only happen in the rare case that you find yourself linked to a site that is known to be infected with malware or spam).

NOTE: Beware of canonical issues [link to upcoming post here]. Canonical issues occur when a search engine has indexed both the non-www version of your site and the www version. Google considers example.com and www.example.com to be two separate sites with duplicate content. This essentially splits your PR between two sites and hurts your position in the SERPs. Channeling all your links to one or the other will instantly affect the PR of one or the other. So, choose which version you would like to use and then be consistent when backlinking. (This may or may not require a 301 redirect to let the search engines know which version they should be using.)

How to get links

As I said in a previous post about the importance of increasing your PageRank to stay on top of your competitors, there are several approaches to link building. Which ones you use and when is a measure of how aggressive your link-building campaign will be. Not every approach will work for you, but find what works and start there. The amount of time, money, and effort involved is entirely up to you, because these strategies run the full range from free and easy to not quite so free and easy.

Ask around…

This is probably the first and the easiest thing you can do. Ask everyone you know who has a website to consider adding your link to their site. Friends, family, even your cousin’s friends may have a place on their site for an extra link or two.

And not just personal acquaintances but business associates as well–employees, groups and associations you belong to, companies you do business with, clients, social networks, etc.

Ask your employees to mention your company in their travels around the web. Some employees might be using social networking software such as Facebook, et al and blogging. Maybe they will mention who they work for and mention your website.

Belong to any groups or clubs? Do they have a website? Are you selling someone else’s products on your site? Maybe the product manufacturer will link to you. Are you on someone else’s client list? On a website? That’s good. Ask to be a “featured client.”

Join search directories

This could be an important next step in your link building campaign. Beyond search engines such as Google and Yahoo! which index millions and billions of web pages, there are other engines which index sites by category or product type. These are smaller and more focused. Several of these “specialty” directories exist on the web. There are directories specifically for blogs, for restaurants, hotels, storage facilities, and more. Find one that suits you and submit your url.

Search “add url”

A simple method for finding sites to link to yours is to search any search engine for the phrase “add url”. Any sites which allow or encourage you to add your url to a list will most likely use the phrase “add your url here” or simply “add url”. You can also try “add a link”, “suggest url”, “suggest a link”, “suggest a site”, “add a site”, etc.

Of course, that phrase alone is too broad. You would prefer to find sites that are related to yours, so search for “add url” + “clothing” if you own a clothing site or “add your site” + “zoology” if your site is about zoology. Google will return any web page that contains the word “zoology” and the phrase “add your site”. That’s just what you want.

This method is simple and a good way to get links, but links you get in this manner probably won’t be of very high quality. Look out for link farms and scams (I wouldn’t pay for links like these), but remember that a link is a link is a link. I am of the opinion that “link farms” will not negatively affect your site’s ranking, they just won’t increase it very much (if at all). If “link farms” could hurt you, then anyone could easily destroy your site’s ranking by simply adding your url to a bunch of bad sites. That’s illogical. This is still a good way to get lots of links, and lots of links is good no matter where they come from. We all want high quality links from pages with huge PageRanks, and if you have the resources you should definitely concentrate on getting high quality links, but in the meantime I wouldn’t look a gift link in the mouth just because it was free and easy to get. Lots of lower quality links will add up eventually and every link helps. They may even bring traffic, if not PR. Google Maps and Yahoo! Local are perfect examples of this. Just get your site out there.

If this sounds tedious, you don’t have to do it by hand. Several programs will scour the web for appropriate sites and auto submit forms for you. A search for “free link building software” on Google will return several options for you to try. SEO Elite comes highly recommended. It’s well worth the money ($167) considering all it can do. You can get a free trial from their website.

Press releases, announcement sites, newletters

Depending on the nature of your service or product these might be good options for you. If you feel you’ve got something especially unique, a well written press release could be just the thing to create a buzz. How about an official “announcement”? Press release distribution services and announcement sites exist in all price ranges.

You may not have thought about writing a newsletter. Maybe you don’t consider the fact that you have a website “news”. So, create some news. Offer a new product or a special deal that’s only good for a limited time. Did you lower your prices? That’s news. Did you get a press release published somewhere? That’s news. Take the time to write a newsletter, solicit subscribers, and distribute it. It may start a conversation about your site, generate a buzz, bring traffic. If you don’t have a newsletter, try to get mentioned in someone else’s newsletter. That works, too.

Find competitor’s links

Several “link popularity” tools and techniques exist for finding out who is linking to your competitors and for analyzing those links. Chances are, if a site is willing to link to your competitor, they might be willing to link to you as well. For that matter, you should always be on the look out for sites that may be appropriate places for you to promote your site.

When you find an appropriate site, the next step is to ask the webmaster or site owner to link to you. Do this in an informal email. Sell yourself the way you would to any partner. Offer a reciprocal link. One way links are better, of course. That is, convincing someone to link to you simply because it would be in their interest or their custmomer’s interest would be great, but don’t be afraid to offer a reciprocal link when appropriate. You can even link to them first, then send them an email informing them that you have linked to their site, and ask for a link in return. Again, you don’t have to do any of this by hand. Several software programs are available which will automate the tasks of link building for you, from finding relevant sites, to analyzing backlinks, to filling out and sending forms and emails to site owners and webmasters. These are invaluable when it comes to keeping track of all your link building efforts (so you know where your links are, the age and the PageRank of said links, what they say, how they perform, who you’ve contacted, who’s contacted you, etc., etc.).

Social networking

Search engines love blogs. Start a blog, participate in blogs. Be a blogger. This is an ever popular way to get your url scattered about the web. Unfortunately, everyone knows it and so many blogs won’t let you leave a link, or they instruct the search engines not to consider any outgoing links in their ranking algorithms (yes, you can do that). If you own a blog, you may need to take steps to prevent people from participating simply for the chance to leave their link behind. Some less scrupulous site owners use “auto-bloggers” just for that purpose.

The social area of the web is growing all the time. MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, etc. No need for me to get into all of it here. Suffice it to say that Social Media Optimization (SMO) has become a branch of marketing all its own.

Buy links

It is possible to simply pay for links. Countless services exist on the web for this purpose, in all price ranges. You can buy links with a specific PR, in a specific category, one way or two way, with term limits or without.

Think of link building as simply another way to advertise. Use the same advertising dollars you would spend on banner ads and pay-per-click ads, and the like. And don’t neglect offline (multimedia and print) advertising as another way to advertise your site and generate interest. Print ads could very well lead to inbound links on the web.

Link building can be as big a project as you make it. The more aggressive you are in your link building campaign, the more links you will get. It’s that’s simple. High quality links are worth money because they will increase your PageRank. That’s a fact. Money spent on purchasing links with PR 4 or higher (for example) are worth the money and possibly all you need, depending on your goals and your competition. Any marketing service you use to promote your site should offer link building as way to optimize your site, place better in the search engines, promote your product, and raise your traffic and sales.

When it comes to SEO, each of the top three search engines are indeed different and use different algorithms to rank your pages. Many site owners will tell you that their site ranks well on one engine, and very poorly (or not at all) on another. Without access to trade secrets from the big three it can be difficult to ascertain what works for which engine, but with some simple observation and experience it is possible to gather a few generalities as listed below and come up with an optimum approach to ranking well across the web and across search engines.

First of all, Google, Yahoo, and MSN take up about 95% of the search engine pie, so attempting to rank well in the myriad other engines might not be worth your time. Ask.com may be worth considering, but that’s another story. I’ll include Ask in the forthcoming summary.

Google

Google is tops. They’ve been at it the longest. They take about 81% of the pie as of February 2009. There’s a reason for this dominance: they are simply the best.

Likes:

Keywords in the url.

Keywords in the title.

Keywords in page headers or h1 tags.

Backlinks, lots of backlinks. Prefers quality over quantity. This is otherwise known as “link popularity” which Google really, really likes. And they only count the ones they like.

Relevant anchor text. External and internal. This is related to link popularity.

Secondary keywords. Enough of them to justify your primary keyword density. This is something I mentioned in another post about singulars vs plurals and latent semantic indexing (LSI) <http://www.sunsigndesigns.com/cgi-bin/ebb/blog2/index.php?action=viewcomments&pid=9> .

Fresh content. Sites which add fresh content on a regular basis will be rewarded. This is why Google likes blogs, especially popular ones. Busy blogs and backlinks. This is also known as “buzz”.

Google seems to prefer informational pages to commercial sites. This is why all those directories tend to dominate the SERPs for certain types of keywords to the ire of most business site owners.

Dislikes:

Similar pages.

Duplicate content.

Over-optimization (spammy text).

Excessive low quality links and link schemes.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! wants to be Google and so has adopted many of Google’s practices. This could be why it is served the second largest piece of the search engine pie or about 12% (which has dropped recently). They tend to like and dislike the same things as Google, but there are a few differences worth noting between the top two search engines (aside from the disproportionate market share) which makes them somewhat easier to dominate than Google:

In direct contrast to Google, Yahoo! tends to prefer commercial pages to informational pages. Unfortunately, this usually means their own commercial pages. At any rate, Yahoo! does use latent semantic indexing in its algorithm, but not as extensively as does Google. Therefore, Yahoo! search results are much more literal than Google’s, and “exact matching” is more important than “concept matching” which makes them slightly more susceptible to spamming or spammy-type text and spamminess in general or spammy spam, if you know what I mean by spam and spamlike spam. You can also say that this makes them easier to “fool” but then I would remind you that for Yahoo! this trait leads to poorer search results, less relevancy, and therefore a generally inferior search engine.

Yahoo! places more importance on the number or quantity of backlinks than does Google. It is common for Google to report 5 backlinks to a page, while Yahoo! reports 50 or more for the same page. In terms of backlinks and how link popularity affects page rank, the difference between quality and quantity may balance each other out when mapping link popularity and effective page rank across both engines (disregarding market share for the moment).

Yahoo! gives more credence to meta keywords and description tags than does Google. When a site owner wishes to improve his or her standing in Yahoo! this is where they usually start. Good descriptions, keyword tags, on-page content, and relevant and descriptive titles will usually pay dividends with Yahoo!

MSN

MSN is small and weak because it doesn’t get enough pie (about 3%). It doesn’t get much pie because it sucks. MSN is the youngest of the big three engines and is still trying to figure out what people want. More accurately, they are trying to bypass what people want by using their brand name to get their foot in the door, and then hoping people will be lazy enough to just accept them as their “default search engine” when buying other Microsoft products (products like Windows and Internet Explorer). This worked for their OS, browser, and office products, but it won’t work for their search engine. People are more saavy these days. The good news is that because they are so small and insignificant there is less competition and new sites can rank well, for what it’s worth. In a nutshell, the MSN algorithm differs significantly from the Google and Yahoo! algorithms in that:

MSN only crawls the beginning of pages (?!) The MSNbot is the laziest of all searchbots, seemingly designed to crawl only home pages. For this reason, it is much harder to grab their attention with backlinks, but because of the resulting small size of their index, it is much easier to rank well with traditional SEO basics: titles, urls, headers, etc.

Because MSN for whatever reason chooses not to crawl too deeply, they put less emphasis on link popularity and more on page content. Again, this is why new sites can rank well, but it also makes them more susceptible to spam and why they rely more on exact matching than on content matching. That is, they are more literal than semantic, and their SERPs are less authoritative and relevant (spammy).

Although MSN places less emphasis on link popularity, they are attracted by new links, like a trout is attracted to a shiny, new lure. But this is fleeting, and again MSN is not very good at crawling and link analysis.

Microsoft being the powerhouse that it is, it would be premature to count them out just yet. They are constantly improving and reworking their algorithm. This makes them less reliable at the moment, but I see them gaining market share as they play catch up and as Yahoo! experiences steady declines in its search results. Yahoo! boasts so many internal products in its attempt to be “all things to all people” and to please “all of the people all of the time” (which is evidenced by how cluttered their home page is compared to Google’s). We have Yahoo! this, Yahoo! that, and Yahoo! the other thing. Yahoo! seems to be competing with itself, and the MSN search engine seems to suffer from the same narcissisim (too many internal products competing with each other). If MSN ever decides to expand its index and at the same time separate its search products from its other products, I think you will see them picking up Yahoo’s lost market share.

Ask

The Ask search engine commands a whopping 1% of the total search engine market, which is why I only included it here as an afterthought. But it may be worth considering if you can find a natural fit within the Ask community. Ask is a topical search site, meaning that it places a premium on sites that are linked to topical communities and categorized “hubs”. Basically, you need the trust and confidence (links and citations) of the Ask community of sites in order to rank well. Ask is more susceptible to spam (keyword stuffing) and less proficient at semantic indexing even within those topical communities. So, even though they tend to concentrate on groups of sites and categories of content, those communities and hubs are usually less authoritative and relevant than they are filled with sponsored ads, ecommerce, and spam. Because Ask is more vertical and narrow (smaller and more specialized) than other engines, it is wise to approach this engine more from a networking or marketing perspective. Like MSN, Ask is not at the moment attempting to gain market share from Google, but is instead attempting to find another angle, create a new market, even change the way people search. It remains to be seen whether or not these smaller engines will evolve into something new or eventually be devoured by Google or some other more traditional engine.

Optimizing for Multiple Search Engines

So, how to approach all three? Is there a way to target each engine specifically, in order to give each engine what they want? There is, but most people would argue that you should pay more attention to what your customers need, rather than what the search engines want. In that case, good, solid, SEO basics and established trust and authority built over time will get the most traction on the web, as opposed to any so-called SEO “techniques”. Be a bull, not a bear, when optimizing and promoting your site.

The main thing which separates Google from the rest is its low tolerance for spam. The converse is also true: what MSN, Ask, and Yahoo! have in common is an overabundance of commercial content, spam, and irrelevant search results. But most site owners still submit to all three of the lesser engines simply because together they make up 20% of the market, which is nothing to sneeze at.

You could create three or four folders or directories (three sites, essentially), each optimized for a specific engine, and then use a robots meta tag or robot.txt file to direct the individual searchbots to the appropriate folder. In other words, Googlebot will crawl and index <http://www.sunsigndesigns.com/cgi-bin/ebb/blog2/index.php?action=viewcomments&pid=5> one group of pages, Yahoo’s searchbot another, and MSNbot still another. This is perfectly reasonable and would probably work, but it’s not worth all that toil and trouble, especially for very large sites.

It is therefore highly recommended that you stick to the basics: keyword and content analyses, titles, urls, header tags, linking structure, and link popularity (backlinks). If you cater to your customers rather than to the search engines, chances are your site will grow and become popular, relevant, and authoritative “on its own.” Did I say popular? Regardless of each engine’s individual quirks, providing good, indexable content, obtaining quality backlinks and generating “buzz” (activity) are still the surest ways to dominance on the web. Get out there. Do something. Participate. Blog. Grow. Expand. Don’t rely solely on titles and tags. Stay fresh, current, interesting, and useful, not stagnant and stale. The search engines will notice. Most of all, cater to your customers and give them what they want and need, something useful. Do that, and the rest will come naturally, including popularity, traffic, and sales. Buzz.

Everything you read about mobile search engine optimization begins with some statistic about how mobile search usage is increasing. So, I’ll get that out of the way first. In 2008, 20 million Americans searched the internet through their mobile phones or PDAs, a 65% increase from the previous year. There are only 1.25 billion PCs in the world, but about 3 billion mobile handsets.

If you haven’t thought about making your website mobile friendly, then you haven’t been paying attention. All the major search engines and plenty of minor ones have invested a considerable portion of their energy in providing content to the mobile search engine market, and this content comes from the millions of website owners and advertisers who have done the same.

Would you benefit from making your website mobile friendly? How do you reach those 3 billion mobile devices? How exactly do you go about making sure your website is mobile friendly? Alright, calm down. The concept is simple: all you need to know is that a PC is not a wireless handset, and a wireless handset is not a PC. So, you will need one version of your website designed for PCs and another version designed specifically for the wireless handset world.

This does not mean you need two websites, of course. By using CSS to separate style from content you can present a “stripped down” version of your core content to the mobile search engines. Google and Yahoo! have services for submitting mobile content and mobile site maps. The W3C provides mobile markup standards like XHTML-MP (XHTML-Mobile Profile). The search engines and the various mobile browser technologies will handle the indexing and display of your web pages to the mobile public, just as they do on your PC.

The technical side of creating a mobile friendly website involves following stricter markup rules and providing lighter pages. That means plain text and smaller images, but with the variety of mobile handsets and mobile browsers out there in those 3 billions hands, the possibilities are not so boring. Some handsets and PDAs cannot handle tables, Javascript, CSS, and multimedia, but many of them can. Accommodating the sheer range of capabilities of the different devices may seem daunting at first, but the ability of CSS to separate style from content and the use of strict standards based XHTML allows you to reach as much of the mobile search market as possible.

There are several validators available on the web where you can test the validity of your markup and your site’s “mobile-friendliness” such as the .Mobi Validator <http://ready.mobi/index.html> and the W3C Validator <http://validator.w3.org/mobile/> . These give detailed error reports which allow your web developer to know precisely how your site would fare on the mobile web and what specifically he or she would need to do to make it standards compliant. There are simulators which allow you to view what your site looks like on different mobile handsets such as the Opera Mini <http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/> /demo <http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/> and the .Mobi Emulator <http://ready.mobi/index.html> . For the .Mobi Emulator you need to enter your url to test the validity of your markup before the emulator renders the page for you. Modern browsers like Firefox and Opera also allow you to turn off certain components (CSS, frames, images, flash, java, javascript, etc.) in your browser which is another way to get an idea about how your pages would render without all of these technologies. Finally, methods for mobile browser detection provide you with the tools necessary to detect which mobile configuration is making the HTTP request and deliver the appropriate content to the appropriate device.

Now the mobile search public is a different kind of searcher than the…um…stationary public. The bulk of mobile searchers tend to be on the move and focus more on things like taxis, pizza, movies, sports scores, local services, and other “give me quick information now” type things than they are in reading, researching, or lengthy browser sessions. This doesn’t complete the entire mobile web picture, of course, but the GPS capabilities of modern mobile devices allow companies like Google and Yahoo! to provide very accurate local search results for mobile users who are most likely looking for a phone number they can automatically dial with the fewest “clicks” and the least amount of scrolling possible. This can even be done on handsets that don’t have a full blown browser installed, without the user even asking or searching for it, basically providing a permanent “contact list” of local services on their phone which is updated in real time. This is basically a “411” of websites.

The full browser capabilities of modern cell phones and PDAs, especially of higher end devices, allow mobile users to navigate your site in much the same way as they would on their PCs. It’s simply a matter of accommodating not only coding requirements, but also the physical limitations of the medium (smaller screens, less processing power, and limited keyboards). The KISS principle applies here more than anywhere else, both in content and in presentation. But the most important thing to remember is that because the attention of the average mobile searcher is focused more on local searches, the mobile SERPs tend to reflect that. Therefore if you want to place well in the mobile world, you need to focus your SEO efforts locally, if you can. There are ways to do this beyond just signing up for Google Maps, Yahoo Local, etc., but signing up for those services will help.

Of course, there are other kinds of mobile traffic besides search traffic. Referral traffic and direct traffic can also come from the mobile web. On that note, while link-building in the PC world is the best way to increase your page rank, in the mobile world “citations” are the holy grail of page rank, rather than links. A citation is when your location information appears somewhere on the web, that is it’s “mentioned” somewhere on some page. So, make sure you put your location and contact information on all your pages and try to get them mentioned elsewhere. Paid advertising on the mobile web also works the same as it does in the PC world. Google Adwords automatically includes your PPC ads in their mobile search network. So, as mobile technology is ever improving and the number of users ever growing, making your site mobile friendly is worth looking into for your particular product or service.