Yesterday was a fun day at SES both for the sessions and the post session beverage consumption. I made sure to go to the mobile sessions, “Mobile Search Optimization” and “Meet the Mobile Search Engines”. While the information presented in the former was very basic with regards to SEO, it did bring to the front of my mind some things I can do with a site redesign I am working on to actually highlight some of my content for mobile devices. Some of the major highlights I gleaned about mobile page design/SEO were about page layout.

For mobile SEO, you kind of flip the page layout that we are generally used to. Content higher on the viewing page, links more towards the bottom. I can buy this — you want the mobile searcher to see your content above the fold on their smaller screens. Another item that intrigued me is including possibly a few jump links at the top of the content to allow a viewer to jump to important components of your page (e.g., navigation, related content, etc). Of course CSS is a major component, divs in particular, and possibly hiding certain page components for mobile users. A concern of mine would have been having Google thinking I am using hidden text to boost rankings, but since you would be using multiple CSS stylesheets (one for mobile, one for screen), it seems like that would work ok. (note to evil alter ego — explore this for spamming! hahaha). There was far more covered, but I need to see it in practice to evaluate the value.

The second session was rather disappointing to me. The Yahoo speaker did a fine job of laying out their mobile platform/visions, but I saw it more as a vision of using their own content. While you could eventually get to mobile publisher content (like mine - duh), the primary content was largely Yahoo owned or partnered content. That’s hardly what I wanted to see. Of course Yahoo is not number 1, nor have they been for a while, so maybe their vision of sticky users will fall flat just as their wired stickiness did (stickiness in a sense that people used to search Yahoo because they were on Yahoo’s site all the time). The Nokia presenter who followed was so far in to this sticky search (you search what they let you) that it was a huge downer for me as far as a presentation. In their vision as interpreted by me, search usage on mobile devices will continue to work as today as long as they have anything to do with it.

I personally would like to see mobile search work just as wired search does today. I go to my engine(s) of choice and type in my search terms and get all relevant results. I don’t want a sticky search where I get search results primarily if not completely driven by my mobile providers partners. Maybe that’s just me.

Going from this presentation to the bar where they were out of Blue Moon on tap was just a double whammy that was tough to take. Luckily I was able to get bottles, but I just had the urge for draft pints!