Responsive web design for your mobile website : Why Google loves it
So, you may ask, what is ‘responsive web design’? Well… It is the way in which many websites are designed so that they are easily read and navigated across a number of devices – For example PC’s, Mobile Phones, Tablets and more. This ensures an optimal viewing experience for everyone visiting the site – regardless of the screen they’re using.
When you decide to build a website which targets tablets or smartphones, you should keep in mind that Google supports three different configurations.
These are as follows (in order of preference by Google):
• Websites which utilise responsive web design. These sites use the same set of URL’s across multiple devices, serving the same HTML.
• Sites which use the same set of URL’s across a number of devices, but where each URL serves different HTML.
• Sites which have separate URL’s for their desktop and mobile users.
Using Responsive Web Design has a number of advantages:
• It ensures that the URL of your website stays the same, regardless of your device. This means that the site is easier to interact with and share. It also allows for Google’s algorithms to assign the correct indexing properties to each part of your content.
• It takes a lot less time for Google to retrieve and index all of your website’s content. Sites that aren’t built using responsive web design need to be crawled by a number of different Googlebot agents in order for the collection of information – something that takes a lot longer.
Every day, the sales of Smartphones, tablets and other similar devices are rising. As you may remember from our blog ‘Why you should think about web design for mobile phones’, Industry experts have predicted that internet usage via mobile phones and similar devices will overtake desktop and laptop computer internet usage by 2014. A vast number of websites are turning to responsive web design to keep up with the new technology era we find ourselves in. More and more companies are building mobile and tablet friendly websites – your competitors could be doing the same.
If you are interested in Responsive web design and would like more information on what Varn could do for you, please contact us at: [email protected].
