These days, more than a quarter of all the people who own a cell phone have used it to go online at some point. That’s a very useful statistic if you’ve only been thinking about people who go online using computers, as mobile website design is growing more gigantic (and potentially profitable) every day. So if your website design isn’t WAP friendly (and if you don’t know what WAP is, you really need to brush up), you could be missing out on millions of potential customers.

These days, everybody’s on the go – even a laptop can still be too big and clunky to hump around. But in the modern world, a lot of people would never dare to be out in public without their cell phone. So designing for these phones isn’t just optional anymore – it’s something you need to start into, if you want to keep your existing audience – and grow your audience by letting existing readers show your amazing content to their friends (who can then immediately look you up, and bookmark you for future visiting).

Since mobile friendly web content is so important, let’s review some important facets of making your web site mobile phone friendly:

*Your web site needs to be coded in either XHTML or XML. If you’re not familiar with these types of coding, you’d better get familiar with ‘em, as it’s a software thing that isn’t going away.

*Character encoding should be UTF-8, again for complex software reasons. Just remember that UTF-8 is important (and either learn it, or find someone who knows it), and you should be fine with making the switch to WAP.

*Obviously, mobile phones have substantially smaller screen sizes than their more probably desk bound cohorts. The largest screen sizes on the market are around 640 x 480 pixels (which hasn’t been industry standard on desktops since the early 90s), while the average is more along the lines of 120 square pixels. Needless to say, huge fonts and massive graphics are a real turn-off when seeing all of one requires a lot of scrolling.

*Don’t expect people to enter lots of text. Instead, give them lists of options, or get creative with buttons of some sort.

*Don’t create huge pages. It’s a bad idea to go over 20 kilobytes, as that typically includes either images, or LOTS of text (which most phone surfers aren’t going to read through, anyway)

Website SEO is a complicated business to get into. For one thing, this isn’t like the old days, when one could just plop down some meta tags and call their SEO done for the day. Nowadays, there’s a long, drawn out thought process you have to go through, if you want your site to find your target audience.

Just remember, you do NOT want everyone – you want the right people. The wrong people will try to twist your site into something it isn’t, and all you’ll probably end up doing is diluting your message. And a watered-down message will make your core audience roll their eyes and move on.

But there is a way, not only to get rid of the people who aren’t really into your message, and to (hopefully) attract people who want to read what you have to say (and maybe even get deeper into the subject). Content is the most natural SEO there is. Let’s take a look at the process:

1. Determine what you want to say.

At the end of the day, this is still your web site we’re talking about. And while gathering feedback and taking good advice are excellent tactics… you’re still the ultimate decision maker, and the primary voice of your site. Literally, what you say goes. So don’t be surprised if you say something and it offends or upsets some people – those people probably don’t want to hear any of your message, so they’ll probably not like most of what you say.

2. Determine who your audience is.

You’ll discover early on that there are several kinds of site rats (people who spend time going through a site) – for one, there are the kind who say nothing. Then there are the kind of people who post tons of kindly feedback and comments. And then, or course, there are your critics… and having critics is good, because how you deal with adversity says a lot about who you are. Answer the question, “Who am I writing for?”

3. Get started!

As Yogi Berra might have said, “It ain’t written ‘til you write it.” The first part of any kind of SEO is producing actual content. That means regular blog posting, press releases, writing articles. Get out your name and your opinions, and you will most likely begin to garner some response.

Just keep plugging away at it – sooner or later, you will get cataloged. And if you’ve got a clear enough picture of who you’re writing to, you should attract them as well.