Google Search Results To Highlight Mobile-Friendly Content

It’s happened to all of us. We search for a topic on Google and find a promising link. We click on it, hoping to find the information that we seek and find … that the website is just awful, virtually unusable, on a smartphone.

The mobile Web is not dead. Nor are websites that never made it to the “mobile” part of the Web and are just bad renders of large-screen sites portrayed on a (comparatively tiny) smartphone screen.

Smartphones are the screen of choice for mainstream American consumers in 2014. The convenience of having a super computer in our pockets is an enlightening, evolutionary step for the human race. So, when the information we want is on a website that our pocket computers can’t read, it is especially frustrating.

To help fix this problem, Google yesterday announced a “mobile-friendly” tag on search results on smartphones and tablets. The search-friendly designation notes websites that can easily be read and interacted and have been optimized to mobile devices.

Google is not just giving away the “mobile-friendly” designation. Website developers have to earn it. Of course, earning a mobile-friendly tag should not be difficult if a developer stays current with modern Web development practices.

Google suggests Web developers adhere to these guidelines:

• Avoid software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
• Use text that is readable without zooming
• Size content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
• Place links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

Is your website optimized for mobile? Check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly test tool to find out. 

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