I’ve been spending quite a fair bit of time on mobile seo over the past year, many brands and businesses don’t seem to realise the importance of this area of search and the implications of serving mobile users a bad experience.

There’s no doubt in my mind that mobile seo will become more important than online. If mobile web browsing is due to overtake desktop by 2015, where do you think people will be starting their browsing from?

It seems a little known fact is that Google has a different search ranking algorithm for mobile devices, they judge websites based upon how they render on the specific model accessing the site.

For example, if your website looks like crap on a Blackberry Bold 9700, filled with errors and incompatible mark-up, eventually you will slip down the page ranking for that specific model. So when other Blackberry Bold 9700 users search Google, you won’t be anywhere to be seen. Meaning neglecting that one phone model could affect the millions of identical handsets around the world searching the mobile web. Interesting hey? Really makes you rethink seo.

The potential impact this will have to a business can be measured in several ways, no more than a competitor getting mobile SEO right and overtaking their rival for higher placement. All the hard work done on online seo could potentially go to waste.

I think this really ties in well with todays news that Google is dominating the mobile search space, according to Pingdom Google is now at 98.29% market share. Globally.

This has actually increased believe it or not, last year Google had 95.58% of the market.

Let’s be honest, this is unlikely to decrease much in the next 2/3 years, especially as Android phones flood the market, using Google as the default browser.

So there should be serious some attention paid to how Google works on mobiles, defo time for everyone to swat up!

As the Flash vs HTML 5 debate roooooars on, the brains at Google have used their famous 20% ‘innovation time‘ to show how far we’ll be able to push web browsers once HTML 5 becomes the norm.

They’ve only gone and ported over Quake 2 into the browser! No CDs, installations or anything. Even Google were surprised to see the game running at over 30 frames per second. Read more about it on the Google Blog.

It’ll be interesting to see what this means for life after apps on mobile as the browser becomes more and more capable.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with HTML 5, it is the latest version of the markup language which makes up most of the web.  The capabilities of HTML 5 were expected to challenge Adobe Flash’s dominance of online video but this shows it could spread into gaming too.

[Via Venture Beat]

Run for the hills! Google is trying to own your entire existence, they want to give you free sat nav, free books, faster internet and kill your family!

Nicely visualised but come on, Google isn’t making anyone use their services…or aaare they?

I wonder if Microsoft commissioned this.

According to reports, Google is developing the technology to enable them to start selling advertising space on real life billboards and posters in Street View. Google registered a new patent which describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with their own ads.

As cool as this is, it raises a number of potential questions which I’m sure will have to be dealt with some point in the near future, especially if this technology can be used for turn-by-turn navigation and Augmented Reality applications. Who actually owns the real life space once it’s online/mobile?

I would say Google own it but no doubt the likes of JCDecaux and advertisers will pipe up and suddenly want their cut. Google will probably play nice and give these sorts of companies revenue share but who knows? Would love to see the outcome of a court case on this one.

This is a really interesting subject and something I think we’ll be hearing much more about in the years to come. What’s your view?

The theory makes sense, once handsets are powerful enough we’ll no longer need hundreds of apps all wasting space on our phone, we”ll just launch are browser and get what we need through that.

If you take the desktop internet experience today as an example – Google Docs, Google Maps, YouTube, Hulu and even Photoshop all can be accessed in the browser. Obviously some have limitations compared to applications that exist on your hard drive but they are improving literally everyday.

It stands to reason that one day this will migrate onto mobile. Currently handsets and operators aren’t quite there yet, faster, more reliable networks and hardware will be required to do the heavy lifting as some of these services need high speed connections and better processors to work efficiently.

Google have just lunched a new addition to their search homepage called ‘Near Me Now’. The button, which only appears on US iPhone and Android handsets that visit Google.com, allows the user to search their immediate vicinity.

The site uses the phones GPS to find user location and provides categorised results such as coffee shops, bars, ATMs and banks.

If you take a look at the video below you’ll see it in action. It’s basically taken one of the best, most useful parts of Google Maps Mobile application and thrown it into the browser.

It’s nowhere near as visual or rich as the Google Maps Mobile app but the functionality is there. This is the start, a mobile website is hooking into the GPS function on the phone..what’s next?

…You can probably expect things like camera functionality to be streamed directly into a mobile web page (like the webcam chat on Gmail, left) one day soon.

As you all probably know by now, Google are releasing their own phone called the Nexus One. The phone is nice, good features but definitely no iPhone killer. However as suggested by Mobile Industry Review it represents something much more than that.

About 6 years ago the first Nokia handsets shipped with Wi-Fi capabilities, there was a huge buzz about being able to make free calls over the Internet using your mobile, however operators put a stop to that by strong-arming the manufacturer by literally saying “Disable it or we won’t bulk buy your phones”.

Sure enough the Wi-Fi stayed but the phones never got VOIP calls until YEARS later. And when it did arrive they tried to charge for it. Operators want other stuff too like putting their own maps application on phones, app stores, and a whole bunch of extra crap they were never meant to do. If you’re trying to build something into the core user interface it’s probably better to let the people who made the rest of the phone do it.

This is typical of how things work in the mobile industry, manufacturers bend over backwards for operators because without them it’s extremely difficult to get your latest and greatest mobile into consumers hands.

But what if you’re the most visited company on the web?

Google have told Vodafone they won’t be able to retail the phone themselves. If a customer walks into the Vodafone store or goes online wanting a Nexus One, they will be pointed to the Google.com/phone website.

As Ewan at MIR says:

(yes, it’s powerful, yes it’s got some cool apps) but the real meat was in their strategy of breaking the operator stranglehold on the mobile industry.

Apple has already shown the kind of flex that giant, sought after brands can have on operators.

Of course you’ll still need an operator to get the phone working but that isn’t the point. This is the very, very beginning of a massive shift. This is the first time it’s been done this way and won’t be the last.