Since the update on April 21st, Google has changed its algorithm which will improve its user experience and respond to the skyrocketing use of mobile devices to access the web. The update makes “mobile friendliness” as a key factor in how it is ranked. This is caused by the large amount of websites in the internet, so whatever your job is web development or SEO service makes sure that you optimize your site into a more mobile friendly by understanding the reason and figure out how to develop a mobile friendly website.
Why Mobile-Friendly, Why Now?
Before beginning, let’s start from the background, the algorithm update tries to make a better search result that is optimized for their devices through this update so users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices. This is possible since text will be more readable without the need of tapping or zooming.
In fact, mobile becomes the first attention since it is reported that 1.3 billion smartphones were sold worldwide in 2014, up 28% over the previous year. However, this doesn’t mean that your site will disappear if it’s not mobile friendly. Even though, being mobile-friendly is important, but there are variety of signals to ranks search results, so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still appear in Google page rank, but not in the highest rank.
Therefore, if you want to survive in a post mobile-friendly-algorithm world, you better consider several tips below:
- Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to figure out if you need a responsive retrofit for your website.
- Use responsive design whenever possible. As opposed to adaptive design and mobile websites, responsive design is the preferred development method by Google.
- Avoid Flash. Please remember that Google will penalize sites that use Flash as it will not be supported on mobile devices.