What are the effects of Mobile Computing?

Mobile computing is definitely going to be the next big thing in SEO. I don't hold this belief simply because of the rate of growth of the tablet market, or the fact that I do own an android tablet, but because tablet PCs and mobile comptuing will change the way that people use the internet, and in particular the routes through which they search.

How did people search before mobile?

In the early days of the internet, when search engines were in their infancy and nearly all ISPs had a portal page that included, well, pretty much everything there was on the internet, the idea of "Surfing" was actually an accurate description of what people did: clicking from the portal to a page of interest and then following links around the few sites serving your niche. Surfing the wave of information.

As search engines became more reliable, and necessary as the amount of information on the web increased, internet usage patterns changed. Browsing became less prevalent and searching became the order of the day. SEO became competitive as sites battled to increase their traffic and over shadow competing websites.

A number of websites kept browsing alive but the majority of usage was very businesslike: get in, get the info, get out.

So what has mobile done to internet use?

Mobile internet has had a number of major effects:

1. Mobile has sharpened the point on the "local" argument to search results, affecting localised SEO
2. Mobile has driven a need for speed of results, affecting on page SEO as we strive for faster sites
3. Mobile has brought back a reliance on RSS feeds
4. Mobile has brought back "Surfing"
5. Mobile has changed ideas of usability and conversion rate optimisation

The changes that some of these have caused to traditional SEO are fairly direct. localising your data, has become a major issue in many campaigns, especially in developing new tactics to ensure your client looks "Local on a national scale" which is a vert difficult thing for medium sized companies and actually requires real world experiementation in many cases.

The speed with which results must be determined and accessed by users is another major factor in ranking for mobile search: if your site does not load fast then Google will not wish to present it to customers searching over 3G or HSPDA.

RSS feeds had slowly been going out of fashion for personal use for a number of years. In fact only windows sidebar users, and a couple of dashboard apps for Mac OS really gave RSS feeds any traffic, although business feeds and newspapers always did well with feeds. Mobile has brough RSS crashing back into non-business use, making a practical use of the RSS feeds created only for SEO purpose. For this reason many companies have gone back over their RSS feeds to make them more usable.

The resurgence of RSS feeds, and apps forming the new "Portal" means that browsing behaviours have come back, increasing the need for SEO's to look at community methods to gain traffic, Guest blogging and link baiting to ensure that browsers can find actual genuine links, rather than just relying on piles of bought links building up position in Search.

Finally, google is basing new parts of the algorithm on the usability of a website, seemingly they have concocted the perfect, ultimate website to which every site is compared. This must be a very general comparison to be a fair test, but again the mobile market could have them flummoxed for a while. Tablet PC's don't work like normal computers, but neither is it appropriate to serve a very limited design, such as you might on a phone, to a tablet. these devices are now bought as PC and/or netbook replacements and so the usage must be considered in a similar way - and a netbook was really just a small laptop. This change in design ideology must necessarily have an impact on SEO as indeed must the very presence of Tablets.

Even within the mobile market, logically speaking there should be wild variations in search results. For example a phone user, accessing the internet via 3G in a location reasonably determined to be the middle of a field, is probably seeking different information (and probably more urgently) than a tablet user, connected to the free wifi in a coffee shop. If Google latches onto these differences and is serious about servicing the mobile market, then how will this be reflected in the SEO we do for differing clients. If our watchwords at the moment are: Keywords, Visibility and Usability, will they change to become: Keywords, Visibility, Situation and Multiple usability?

Either way, Mobile Search is here to stay and all savvy business owners will need to get their mobile strategy straight, or talk to an SEO company that is already thinking into the future of mobile search, in order to get the drop on their competition and drive their success online, through all forms of access.