Global mobile subscriptions are expected to top six billion this year which is especially remarkable given that there are only seven billion people on Earth! These mobile enabled individuals have incorporated their devices into every aspect of their lives, including purchasing.

Amazon.com sells more than one billion dollars a year through mobile device orders alone. With this virtually universal market, online marketers are swiftly realizing that their mobile prospects have specific requirements which must be catered to in order to ensure the best possible customer experience, as well as to obtain the greatest SEO benefit.

Following these top eight tips will help you provide the content your mobile customers want in a manner that boosts your SEO efficiency.

1. Structure keywords for predictive search

The average Google query on its Mobile Search is just 15 characters long and relies on predictive phrase and query suggestions to complete the enquiry. The time-honored Google AdWords Keyword Tool has recently added a mobile-savvy function available under Advanced Options & Filters which allows you to select to show ideas and statistics for: Desktop & laptop; All mobiles; Mobile WAP; or Mobile devices with full internet browsers. Identifying a set of keywords which are likely to be served up by Google Mobile Search when seeking the products or services you're competing for can help you grab more of that all-important mobile traffic.

2. rel=canonical is your URL's best friend

When you're creating your pages specifically engineered for smartphone access, don't forget the rel=canonical which can point to your conventional computer version of the same page. When smartphone users visit that conventional page, they can be instantly redirected to the smaller, mobile page. This structure is applicable in almost any URL structure, eliminating the need for separate smartphone subdomains and subdirectories. Google Head Wizard Matt Cutts has posted a very instructive 20 minute redirect video tutorial on Google Webmaster Tools.

3. Treat Googlebot-Mobile as any other unknown User-agent

The content that should be provided to the User-agent that Googlebot-Mobile uses for indexing can vary according to the various strings in use which are all formatted in this manner:

[Phone name(s)] (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

The list of phones is quite limited as Googlebot-Mobile does not crawl with a smartphone User-agent string so a generic version is the best bet for most mobile phone displays. Always ensure that you view your emails and pages via a broad spectrum emulator or simulator as well as on every mobile web enabled device you and your entire staff can get their hands on. MobiForge has posted a very handy and thorough guide to the primary emulators.

4. Specifically segregate sitemaps

A sitemap is a sitemap is a sitemap? Unfortunately that's very wrong when it comes to Google's implementation which is structured as this sample: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
    <url>
        <loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
        <mobile:mobile/>
    </url>
</urlset>

Miss any of these elements such as the <mobile:mobile/> and your pages won't be crawled. Make sure that only your mobile pages are included in your mobile sitemaps as conventional pages will be ignored, however, you can list URLs which provide both conventional and mobile content. Google's primary guide to mobile sitemaps can be found on their Webmaster Tools Help.

5. Goodbye Flash, Hello ancient Animated GIF!

The more things change, the more they stay the same, so in order to keep your emails and landing pages from displaying nothing where your Flash presentations should be, rediscover the motion image format that originated in the Jurassic CompuServe period of online communications: Animated GIFs. When properly designed and optimized, Animated GIFs can provide very similar effects to the best Flash presentations. Photoshop is the generally preferred way to create Animated GIFs but there are various capable software applications available as shareware such as CoffeeCup and Animated Gif Creator that will do the job. Unlike Flash or HTML5, Animated GIFs are based on the same principle as motion picture films with individual still images being served up in quick sequence. That structure dictates that you should minimize the number of frames so that your animation will load quickly and play properly on any mobile device. Unfortunately that restriction effectively eliminates the feasibility of incorporating smooth fades, dissolves, and motion that is not cartoonish.

6. Shun horizontal scrolling

Mobile web enabled devices have an exceptionally broad range of display abilities. Tablets can generally be counted on to provide a comparable number of viewable pixels to many desktop and laptop computer screens but most smartphones will severely truncate the number of vertical and horizontal pixels. Vertical scrolling is always preferable to the horizontal version as having to scroll to completely read each line is a great way to alienate your reader. Almost all smartphone manufacturers list their pixel resolutions on the technical specifications of their websites, as Apple does for all their iPhones which are set at 640 horizontal pixels at the very high resolution of 326 ppi. To be on the safe side and accommodate the breadth of smaller smartphone screens, the reasonable minimum is around 320 horizontal pixels.

7. Shorten your "alt" text

If your "alt" text is actually longer than the width of the image it describes, then many email clients such as Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, and Windows Live Mail will fail to display it. Always keep your image description as short as possible to ensure that it can be read by the vast number of users who have images off in their browsers either by default or personally set preference.

8. Apply default image background colors

While you're refining your "alt" text to suit the images off crowd, apply different default background colors to each image. This will have the result that your images off page will display with some aspect of real design rather than just a big white page with lots of little red Xs all over it.

By 2015 mobile web access is expected to surpass the level of conventional desktop and laptop computers, so there is little question that the path to the brightest SEO and marketing future is fully mobile!