SMX East: The iPhone's Effect On Search

By Doug Caverly - Mon, 10/06/2008 - 10:48am.

More prods and nudges than leaps and bounds

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL are all at very different stages of corporate life, and often don't focus on the same things. All of the companies have expressed an interest in the mobile market, however, and so as marketers consider matching this, a session at SMX East was called "Search and the iPhone."

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Cindy Krum of Blue Moon Works started things off with a broad subject: the death of the .mobi. The domain isn't good for SEO and isn't preferred in mobile search. Instead, companies and bloggers can get ahead in mobile search by creating either related mobile only pages or mobile/traditional hybrid pages. And that's assuming they need to do anything at all, since it's best to gauge mobile demand and traffic before catering to it.

Gregory Markel, the founder and president of Infuse Creative, later echoed the need to monitor mobile usage. He also advised keeping in mind the location-specific nature of the iPhone, which makes it best to have addresses and phone numbers accessible.

Alex Muller, the CEO of Slifter, then stepped up discuss apps. There are advantages and drawbacks to creating them, with the potential for wide distribution falling on the "good" side. But apps are expensive to build, and may not possess any true longevity.

Although some optimization is fine, then, it seems that companies must be sure they're not entering an "iPhone before the horse" situation.

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

About the author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Comments

Submitted by Vance Hedderel, Director of PR & Communications, dotMobi (WPN reader) on Tue, 10/07/2008 - 10:34pm.

The death of the .mobi? Really?

I am surprised when I see misinformation about the .mobi domain being positioned as truth, especially in relation to SEO.

I must say that the "death of the .mobi" is profoundly exaggerated. There are more than 1,000,000 active .mobi domains being used and promoted across the world. See a sampling of them at http://mtld.mobi/node/997.

And there's a reason two of the top search engines -- Google and MSN -- invested in dotMobi. We know a thing or two about mobility and mobile search. We even built a purely mobile search engine (see http://find.mobi).

I suggest SEO practitioners review the material on our mobiThinking.com site, in particular our article on mobile SEO at http://mobithinking.com/best-practices/mobile-seo-best-practices.

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