By Lionel Monardo

YNOT EUROPE – Mobile redirection is the star of the mobile market. Its use does not require knowledge of mobile website development, and redirection from an existing website allows webmasters to take a step toward a new market.

A redirection script provides a solution to help monetize the mobile audience of your website, but it also can be used to optimize and focus mobile traffic. Not all websites can be reformatted for mobile access, because the conversion can be costly. Mobile visitors can be valuable, though, if one can convert them in other ways.

The user agent
You probably already know that browsers identify themselves by sending behind-the-scenes information to web servers when a user visits a website. Among the information transmitted is the user agent data referring to browser type and version, along with the visitor’s operating system and when appropriate, device and rendering engine.

For example, here is the user agent info for the HTC’s 7 Mozart model handset:
[quote]Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows phone OS 7.0; Trident/3.1; IEMobile/7.0, HTC, 7 Mozart Orange)[/quote]User agent data is one of the basics of mobile redirection, making it easy for webmasters to see what kinds of devices users employ to access their web pages and how much traffic they may be losing because the user’s equipment can’t render the site on mobile devices. We’ll see how to fix that below.

Impact on SEO
Can using a mobile redirection script endanger the SEO of your website?

The process of redirection is not new to SEO. Redirection informs search engines when an where to forward traffic and for how long — permanently or temporarily — depending upon the nature of the redirect. For mobile redirection scripts, we use a “302 redirect,” which is a temporary or provisional redirect that does not transfer all traffic somewhere else forever. (Yes, permanent redirects can affect SEO.)

A 302 redirect is easy to accomplish with PHP by incorporating the following into the HTTP header:

[PHP][/PHP]A 302 redirect is automatic and will remain in force until the code is removed or replaced.

We can add additional conditions like “cache-control: no-transform, no-cache.” That code snippet indicates to the proxy not to process or store the source. “X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow” tells the search engine not to index the redirect page or track links.

If you use a redirect to monetize your mobile traffic, you do not endanger the SEO of the original page.

Open-source script generation service
A very useful web service, called Mobile Browser Detect, detects the browser but also helps webmasters build appropriate redirection scripts.

To use the tool, first choose the language for the resulting script (PHP, Apache, etc.). For example, if I select “Apache,” I will be able to download the preformatted file “detectmobilebrowser.htaccess.txt.” All that remains is to edit the file and replace the URL “http://detectmobilebrowser.com/mobile” with the URL of the page to which you wish to direct your mobile traffic.

Redirection to monetize web traffic
What about mobile sites that attract non-mobile traffic? We can redirect that traffic to a standard website by reversing the direction of the redirection.

An SEO-optimized mobile website can attract non-mobile traffic from search engines and other sources just like a standard website attracts mobile traffic. And just like mobile traffic rarely converts on non-mobilized websites, standard web traffic can become abusive of a mobile site if your goal is to build mobile traffic quality.

Don’t despair! Here is an example of PHP code that may be placed at the top of a mobile page, just like the previous script was placed on a standard web page:

[PHP][/PHP]The script will read the user agent and then redirect web traffic to a standard website or sales page.

Mobile traffic is changing
A few years ago, the mobile traffic hitting a website composed only a tiny percentage of total visitors. Today, users are moving away from the desktop, more and more often employing smartphones and other mobile devices that can access rich, multimedia experiences. For webmaster who want to offer a more immersive porn experience, mobile may be the answer. For those who can’t “go mobile” yet, try partnering with a company that can at least monetize a portion of your traffic so all the mobile users don’t go to waste.

Lionel Monardo is founder of the forum Xmobiz.com and the mobile affiliate program DizmoCash.