Google will rank your blog lower if it’s not mobile friendly – the BlogHer ’12 wrap

I learned lots at BlogHer. I am happy with all the classes I attended. I went to learn about some more technical behind the scenes stuff.

I know some of you read my tweets and I feel pretty passionate about where blogging fits in to our marketplace. The Americans are so far ahead of us. I know some of the bloggers who went didn’t feel this way, but I did. Maybe it was just the classes I attended that made me feel that way. I was impressed. I want to become a real blogger after seeing them in action. 1.4 million page views a month is “pretty average“. HA!

When I say America is so far ahead, I mean it in terms of how brands work with bloggers. To them, blogging is not NEW media. It’s media. American brands realise that bloggers have huge impacts on their products and we have an audience (and some have BIG audiences).

I won’t go on and on about everything I learned, but I will say it is going to be a goal of mine to keep encouraging, networking and pushing brands to work with bloggers in innovative, remarkable and positive ways…

You can see some of my tweets here. I really got in to it…

Today I thought I’d give you a few quick short tips you can take away with you….

Firstly, I hope you have Google Analytics added to your site. If you don’t, then I will write a post this week about how to do that.

Google rankings

Google will rank your blog lower if it’s not fully mobile friendly. That’s correct.

As an example – over 70% of the London Olympics was watched via MOBILE (ie. phones + tablets).

Find out what popular devices readers are using to get to your site.

These are mine:

So, if the majority are viewing my site via a device then it has to be mobile friendly. I’ve installed WP Touch Pro.

This makes it also tricky for those of you who have sidebar advertising. If only 30% of readers are seeing your sidebar advertising (ie. via a desktop device), then are you giving your advertisers the best exposure? Have you integrated your Advertising into your mobile friendly layout?

Also, look at what your Bounce Rate is… if it’s less than 1 minute it’s considered poor. The aim is to keep your readers on your page as long as possible (AND get them to view more than 1 page). All of this is available in your Google Analytics data. If you have analytics installed but don’t know how to find these details, then google the topics and you’ll find it 🙂

Submit a sitemap

Tell Google which pages are/are not important to you, so when someone searches your blog they can see the most important things:

Go here. Add your site – click on the newly added site, click Optimization and Sitemaps. You can’t just copy and paste pages in to the webmaster sitemap tool. Go here to read more. If you use WordPress here is a plugin which can do some of the work for you! You can tell Google which pages you don’t want.

Gadgets and Sites

Broken Link Checker – run this once a month on WordPress sites to make sure people you’ve linked to, or your own links are still working.

Hootsuite – this is the best to use for twitter. Use their shorten links when posting a link because it has a good measuring scale ie. you can see who has clicked on to your link. It’s a good measure to see if posting to twitter is working.

Google Calendar – we’ve yet to become friends, but we will be this week! Cozi is another calendar which can be shared easily. Great for husband to check where we are up and what we’ve got on!

Dropbox or Evernote for storing ANYTHING. You can bring up Dropbox from any computer, tablet, phone – anywhere in the world. No more external hard-drives!

Google docs – if you are collaborating documents with other people.

Docusign Ink – no more printing things off, signing them and scanning them back in! Love this!

SEO

SEO is not a silo any more. The rules have changed. You just can’t tag things any more and think you are done with SEO. 30% of your SEO is based on your on page stuff – the other 70% of SEO is based on what steps you physically take to contribute to your SEO.

The best SEO? It’s video. Watch this space. I’ll show you more.

Being on Google+ is a must for higher google rankings. Makes sense! Google will love you if you love it!

Test your site load time with this: tools.pingdom.com/fpt.

Eliminate unnecessary plugins.

The best SEO plugin for WordPress is yoast.com/wordpress/seo.

Oh, can you see a pattern here with WordPress? Yep, it’s the winner. NO ONE even mentioned Blogspot. Ever. Google loves WordPress!

Vlogging and Apps

These are the new waves of blogging. Not just words on a page. I walked away from these 2 classes with a hundred ideas. I’ll be working on those in the coming months.

In the meantime, you guys can help me! I need a good PR Company who wants to work with me on this blog? I’m not turning my words in to advertisements, but I have some ideas on how I can work with the companies who approach me in a different way. So, over to you… Email me if you know of a PR Company? I know you’ll help me, because I’m helping you with these tips! 😉

In summary, I got a lot out of BlogHer. I’ll be trying to go back next year (it’s in Chicago). Watching intelligent, savvy and business driven women in action up on those stages at BlogHer gave me goosebumps. It’s a pocket I want to be in… striving to push my blog upwards and upwards.

I’m no blog guru. I’m just interested in learning and sharing what I can along the way (and fumble as I go!). PS. If you really don’t know what any of this means, or it sounds like it’s too intense, please don’t attempt to add and change things on your blog (I’d hate for anything to happen to it!)…

See you next week! X