What Is A Mobile Responsive Site?
Many people are not quite clear on what responsive means. There are many ways to experience web content using a mobile device. At the lowest of the low, you can have an entirely non responsive old fashioned website, which displays exactly the same on mobile as it does on desktop. Next up would be a mobile redirect site. A mobile redirect site pushes visitors to a different url on subdomain or subdirectory, so they can browse a different site made for mobile. This requires search engines to have 2 separate sets of urls, making it harder to link things. These sites also do not respond to changes in viewport, they are set based on the intial device width, which means if a phone is flipped from portrait to landscape, there is not much a mobile redirect site can do about it.
At the high end of modern mobile design exists pure responsive. Pure responsive shows exactly the same content across mobile and desktop, and uses CSS to adjust the display. This type of code does not need JS – the device width is detected by the browser, passed to the stylesheet. When the viewport changes, the new width is again passed, and the relevant code is called.
How Can I Tell If This Site Is SEO Friendly?
At the end of the day, there is an unlimited amount of optimization that can go into any website. But we judge whether a design is SEO friendly based on how it is coded more than whether it has actually been optimized. Some quick criteria, which this site passes, include:
- Is the site lightweight, or does it have a large amount images, videos and other media which slow load times?
- Is the content not able to be crawled, due to large amounts of JS or AJAX that make it hard to access?
- Does the site have blocked resources, or place which content is called from that is unable to be crawled?
- Does the site use a reasonable URL structure, one that allows for search engine to index content, not dynamic constantly changing urls?
- Does the website which is being designed have a plan for mobile and responsive, since this is 60% of all traffic on the web?
- There are plenty more criteria to consider, from font sizes to color contrast, a search friendly site must be very useable