India Site Clinic, Part 1

Thank you webmasters for your overwhelming response to the Google India Site Clinic initiative. The sites submitted covered 12 diverse categories, making this an excellent sample set for our analysis. As we analyzed the sites we were able to identify a few trends where we’d like to help Indian webmasters improve. So in this post we will address one of the most pressing concerns for a webmaster at this point in time: should a webmaster invest in a smartphone-optimized presence.

30% of the world’s smartphone users live in India and China (source)

India is one of the leading mobile markets worldwide. The nation has 919.2 million mobile subscribers as of March 2012 (TRAI, May 2012), which is 75% of the population. 65% of mobile subscribers are urban dwellers.

So why would your website benefit from having a mobile presence? Time for some colorful graphs and revealing statistics. The following statistics are derived from http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com. Surveys were conducted over 2 phases (March - July 2011 and January - March 2012) and 1000 sample users (across all age groups and gender) were surveyed for each of the phases.

78% of smartphone users visit a search engine on a daily basis.

Source: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/

Now let’s have a look at how the smartphone user spends his time on the Internet.

Source: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/ 

The graph indicates that 32% of surveyed users used online/mobile shopping coupons, 56% of them downloaded content, and at least 40% of them collectively spent time searching for restaurants/pubs, jobs, travel/holidays or reading news and magazines. Every site submitted for review to our Site Clinic fits one or more of the activities above so for these sites, a smartphone-friendly website might provide advantages to its users.



Good Mobile User Experience



For example, when a friend recommends a website he liked, your first reaction might be to check it on your smartphone as it may be some time before you get access to a desktop or laptop. If you aren’t able to read the content on the site or if the site doesn’t render properly on your mobile, you may be disappointed and might even forget about checking the site later on. Hence, a good user experience on mobile is very important.

Here is an example of the difference a mobile site can make:

Example site: www.caclubindia.com

These are a few simple things that have changed in the mobile version of the site:

1. Text is legible without zooming or panning


2. Links and buttons can be easily tapped with a thumb


3. Search functionality is accessible through use of a button

Is your site mobile-friendly?
To check how your site renders on a mobile phone you can simply check on your phone and see how your site looks. For a deeper analysis we recommend use of the GoMoMeter.

Now that you’ve had a look, let’s go through the steps to provide a great mobile experience to your users.

Building a smartphone optimized site

Google supports three configurations

1. 
   Sites can use responsive web design, i.e., sites serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google's recommended configuration.
   
   


2. 
   Sites can dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user-agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
   
   


3. 
   Sites can have separate mobile and desktop URLs.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

We recommend using responsive design because using a single URL makes it easier for your users to interact with, share and link to your content. It also helps Google's algorithms to assign indexing properties to the content. Redirection will not be needed for users to get to the device-optimized view, which reduces loading time. For detailed analysis of this and other approaches, please see our developers page for building smartphone-friendly sites.

We hope this post got you thinking about your site in the mobile space. Look forward to the next post in this site clinic series where we’ll address another interesting trend.



Posted by The Google Search Quality Team

India Site Clinic: Get your Site checked today

Namaste Webmasters!



In January, Matt Cutts from the Webspam team visited India and in a Hangout on Google+ addressed many of your doubts and questions. As a follow up, the Search quality team at Google India is very excited to conduct a clinic for your website, right here on the Google India blog.



What does this mean? 

Our team will analyze the websites submitted to the clinic. We will offer constructive advice on improvements that can lead to better visibility for your website in Google's organic search results.



So how do I submit my entry?

To register your site for our site clinic, fill in the information requested on the form here.



(Do note that by submitting your site you agree to the use of your website as an example in our future blog posts under the Site Clinic banner.) We also have a few important guidelines that you need to follow:



1) To participate, your site must be registered on Google Webmaster Tools. This is to ensure that the submitter is the owner of the site and we have the owner's permission to use the site for our clinic. If you don't have a Webmaster tools account yet, it's pretty simple to obtain. You can get one here.



2) Your website should meet our quality guidelines. This is because we will be using the same guidelines as criteria to select the websites for our analysis. You can review our Webmaster guidelines for any clarification. 




The Site Clinic goes live today and submissions will be accepted till the 14th of May 2012. 



Please Note: We will be taking in a limited set of sites for complete analysis. Among these, a few representative ones could be chosen as examples to address broad themes and share best practices in our follow-up blog posts.




Posted by Google Search Quality Team