The Mobile Developer

Quite a lot of development has gone into mobislim recently. We have added the latest bango mobile analytics tracking tools to the site. These include bgo_campaign parameters etc. and these are passed to the site via the request query parameters. Once any of the 6 valid bango parameters are detected by the site, they are stored in the users session and are appending on all page tracking numbers and all bango relay numbers. Therefore we can track where a user has come from campaign wise, for every bit of content they download, and even when they register.

We had a bit of a dillema when adding this functionality, since in order to maintain session states for devices which do not have cookies enabled, you need to store the jsessionid in the parameters, and we removed the functionality for this when we began our mobile seo experiments. This was because we saw that google had picked up the sites with different jsessionid’s and were treating the same pages as different pages but with the same content and thus punsishing our rankings for it. However, I have read that google now has better support for both query parameters and jsession id’s… so lets see because afterall the most important thing is the mobile analytics - since without it you can’t really tell if your mobile seo is working optimally or not.

We now have 4 versions of mobislim. There is mobislim.com sa.mobislim.com which has some south african commedy videos on it and there is also the d2c.mobislim.com which we built for TMobile in the States. Finally there is the iphone version of mobislim. It is still on a staging url but I will put it onto a proper mobislim url soon and write about the fun I had with javascript, ajax, dodgy stylesheets etc doing that…

Similar to the other site we are testing mobile seo on, we did absolutely no Mobile Seo on Mobislim after we managed to boost rankings for all our target terms. After 1 month one of our new target terms “slimming” has improoved conciderably, we are now #24 for “slimming” and we were about 80 a month ago, and we have done absolutely nothing in this time. Ace.  We are also ranking for related slimming terms such as slimming products, and slimming hoodia. (Hoodia is a pooular slimming product).

OK well after a few days of mobislim.com not even coming up in a google mobile search for “mobislim” it has now appeared as slot 6 on the front page. We are still not ranking for other search terms such as the “radish diet”.

So our site is currently in index limbo. Our old urls, which we’ve 301′d to the new homepage are still in the index, (but presumably not doing very well since they are only linked to the homepage), but our new super amazing mobile seo friendly urls have not been indexed yet. Here’s a link to the main mobile slimming page. And here’s a link to the cold water diet page, which as you can see has been beautifully crafted - now please please please mr google spider - can you crawl mobislim and particularly pick up this fascinating article about the cold water diet?

We had confirmation today from Bango Button that we could upgrade the framework for mobislim.com so that it could utilise our new Scorch Controller (TM). This was also ok’d by the mobislim web mistress and mobislim blog writer - Maria.

Scorch Controller ensures that the cms publishes search engine friendly url’s. But simply putting mobislim under Scorch Control was not a big enough challenge for the day. I am therefore currently working on enhancing the ScorchControl to:

• Create a dynamic page title based on the current asset / page command function.
• Read in meta data from the current asset and if present use this to populate the “decription” and “keywords” meta tags. (This requires adding these fields to the asset object, and creating setters for these in the CMS.
• Generate related tags for articles / assets. i.e. if an article is tagged with “health”, “slimming” and “diet-pills”. Then when on the view articles page, there will be links for health, slimming and diet pills, which list all articles containing these tags.

We can then create a google mobile site map for the new mobile seo friendly url’s.

I propose to have the above all running and migrated by the crack of dawn tomorrow. The fact that I can do this within this time frame is all down to the beauty that is Spring MVC - the Java framework which the Scorch Controller is implemented in.

More soon!

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

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.

The Mobislim project is now entering its marketing campaign phase. Maria Bunter has been put incharge of marketing and we’ll be working with her as she drives traffic to mobislim. We have incorporated lots of mobile analytics into the mobislim site, so that Maria can track the effectiveness of her campaigns.

Maria has compiled a good list of mobile advertisers which she is going to use. I’ve dealt with some of them but there are some new names here. I’ve realised that an added bonus of this project is that I will be able to rapidly collate data on mobile traffic providers, and use this knowledge to make recommendations to our customers.

Maria’s list includes 4th Screen Advertising, Admob, Amobee, Adstar, Ads Handy and Mojiva .

We deployed Mobislim to its production server today so that Bango Bunter can check it out. We’ve got more categories too add but I’m pleased that our new CMS and analytics enhancements are giving us the flexibility we require for the project - and Bango Bunter is pleased with the way the site’s looking and working and particularly happy with how quickly we got it running - even despite the server issues we had with our hosting provider - fasthosts.

Here’s how the site’s looking at the moment: