The Mobile Developer

Ok So I got up at the crack of dawn to get working on my mobile seo for our animation fc tottenham hotspurs wallpapersm ringtones and animations site .

Ok actually dawn hasn’t happened yet, but what has happened is that we now rank for ‘Spurs Chants Ringtones’. We are on slot 5 on page 1. Interestingly the page leads you striaght into the main spurs page, and not the special spurs-chants-ringtones page we created.

I wonder what other things we can do to boost it’s position. I’m thinking about experimenting with changing the hyphens to underscores… [to be continued].

OK So I managed to get the sitemap picked up by google, and google has crawled the pages. The great news is that we now show up on page 1 of the google search for “mobile animations”. This is brilliant because it is on the web page of google mobile search, which is actually the default page which users see. The bad news is that we wanted it to appear, and were expecting it to appear in the “mobile” results tab. It is still not there. Also I am having problems getting this url to be picked up by google! http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-go-marching-in-ringtone.jsp

Hopefully there will be more news on this soon. But it certainly seems that what google does for mobile (and I guess this isn’t a surprise) is somehow done less frequently or carries less weight than standard web indexing.

We are not ranking at all for “spurs chants ringtones” on google mobile search (mobile results). Have created a new page on spurs and called it spurs-chants-ringtones. I have added some spurs chants ringtones keywords and page title etc. I put a link to this page from our new static Animation FC main page (mob.animationfc.mobi) which goes to this page. The url is http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-chants-ringtones.jsp

I posted a blog on my Animation FC Animations For Mobile Blog about this yesterday. I did not mention this page on twitter though.

I have spent some time this afternoon performing some simple mobile seo for the Tottenham Hotspurs wallpaper ringtones and animations site.

1. We were getting no ranking for “spurs ringtones” so I’ve changed the page name to include spurs in it. i.e. the new link is http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-ringtones.jsp instead of just being ringtones.jsp
2. I have changed the title tags for each page to go in <h1> tags were possible. (using <b> for wml devices).
3. I have resubmitted the google sitemap with the new urls. Last time it took a year for google to pick it up so I’m hoping for a quicker turnaround this time.
4. I have created a special landing “preview” page for a couple of ringtones. One of them I am going to link to in this blog, and will get my friend and seo expert David Carruthers of One Result to metntion it in his blogs etc. The other one we will not, and we will see which one, gets boosted. The link of the one I am increasing the inbound links for is the Spurs ringtone, “Spurs Go Marching In” - the url is: http://mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/spurs-go-marching-in-ringtone.jsp
5. I have changed the generic “Spurs” title on each page to be specic to each section. i.e. the page title for Spurs Ringtones is now “Spurs Ringtones” and not “Spurs”.
6. I have submitted the sitemap to the root domain i.e. http://mob.animationfc.mobi/ instead of mob.animationfc.mobi/a/spurs/
7. I have also changed a method which is called by all anchor writing tags which calls response.encodeURL(href) to now do absolutely nothing. This is because I noticed that google had included a jsession id on every single url it had crawled… (not good).
8. This site does not make use of the new ScorchController(TM) so is still parameter based. However, I spent a small amount of time ensuring that we were optimising the parameters for the football site so that they did not contain any redundant information.

Well that’s about it… now to wait and see when a) my sitemap gets picked up b) the site gets crawled and c) if any of the above has done any good!

This evening I just finished the core implementation of our new Spring based MVC controller for providing SEO friendly url’s. It’s called the Scorch Controller and it takes makes all its decisions autonomously based on the ScorchState. After it has forwarded to the appropriate JSP it then gives the JSP the ScorchState which it used to get to the JSP. The page can then use the state to create the seo friendly external links for the ScorchController. A few weeks ago it was all a dream but now it is live and working at an undisclosed location. Tomorrow I am going to create a google mobile site map and submit the secret site. Then I am going to try and migrate the ScorchController into mobislim.com our slimming and dieting based mobile web analytics product, so we can see how the search engine optimisation is affected.

We have just received go-ahead on performing search engine optimisation for our mobile analytics project mobislim.com !

We are working with Top SEO Company One Result in order to boost the rankings of Mobislim for diet related searches.

This will work nicely with the amazing new advances in Bango’s Analytics and Billing systems - which will give valuable referal and campaign tracking data.

More information about mobile search engine optimisation can be found here

Today there was another Animation FC / Daily Star / Bango campaign. This time with Celtic and Rangers. It was only promoted in the northern version of the newspaper though. We didn’t have the massive number of hits as we did with yesterdays Man Utd Free Wallpaper + Premiership Clubs Spinning Animated Screensavers Promo but still saw a lot of happy people downloading free content!

Animation FC did a great campaign with the Daily Star today, in conjunction with Manchester United Football Club and Bango mobile billing and analytics. With a front page ad for the Man U free wallpapers and free Premier Club screensavers, we were delivering a content item every few seconds and I was pleasantly surprised to discover the servers were running at less than 5% processor utlisation.

Obviously we used Bango for the wap site discovery and billing on the cross sell items. So, not only did we get great conversions on the upsells but we also enjoyed the benefits of premier league mobile analytics!

These promotions with the Daily Star will be ongoing, so we are looking forward to the official release in the new bango analytics API which will give us *even better* campaign tracking for cross sell items (if that is possible)!

Having setup BasicState to monitor the various analytics sites, we managed to identify the one which was causing unreasonably large page times. Forthwith, we notified the analytics provider so that they could improve their systems. (Partly to help them out and partly because all the “server down” messages were really begining to takeover my inbox).

I was there pleasantly surprised to discover that over the weekend the server down messages had stopped and thought it must have been an easy win for the analytics development team. However, I have just realised that the daily summaries from the server monitoring provider have also stopped, and upon visiting their site, I get a DNS failure. I can only take this as a sign of the times. They were voted something like “biggest business to watch” by NBC in January 2008, but now in November, they have disappeared without a trace. They had been providing a very decent service, which I had used on a number of different sites and I feel sorry for nice guy running it.

Although, its perfectly feasible that its actually his hosting provider who has either gone wrong, or gone under. We shall see.

We’re currently working on adding some new features to Mobislim. These include a new premium section, which is available only to subscribers, experimenting with some mobile SEO, and adding enhanced site monitoring.

The new subscribers only section will use Bango Safe Subscriptions so we can have a special section which allows us to add premium diet articles and tips to users who pay our bargain 1$ per month subscription charge. I’m actually going to write an article myself for this section - on why it’s important to alkalise your body. I learned about this on an Anthony Robbins “Get The Edge” cd and am now totally into it. (So much so that I’ve spent £50 on an Anthony Robbins special green drink which helps alkalise the body). For more info, on alkalising, and why it will not only help you lose weight, but also stop you from dying prematurely, join the VIP subscribers section… only on MobiSlim!

For the SEO we’re going to be adding a google site map, and submitting the sitemap to google. We will need to compare where we appear on google mobile search before and after adding the sitemap to see if it makes any difference. I guess we can add some meta tags in as well just to see if they make any difference. As with most SEO I should imagine that incoming links will probably be the biggest help. Maybe we can get some links added to mobislim from some sites on wap.com.

As for the monitoring, we are currently employing the services of BasicState.com which pings mobislim every 15 mins. Basic State’s DataCenter is in North America, and we’ve noticed that they record some timeouts hitting mobislim, even though we know the site is fully visible. I have a hypothesis that this could be due to the numerous analytics providers code we have on the mobislim site. So I’m going to create a separate index page, with associated subdomain, and see if any 1 of the analytics providers code seems to be causing a large page load time when hit by the BasicState server.

Whilst doing this, I will also be adding the code of a new analytics provier which has now moved out of beta, so we can test what they can do for us too.