While everyone struggles to get their sites into the mobile Web space the Internet is quietly experimenting with new technologies that could, if fully adopted, render all that mobile marketing obsolete. The trend of allocating more and more money toward building a mobile presence in corporate thinking is too slow moving to stay on top of what is happening in Web technology now. In fact, the budgeting inertia will probably delay adoption of the latest Web technologies on many sites for 1-2 years.
By next January (of 2016) many marketers will be blogging, Tweeting, or guest posting about how the desktop and the mobile interface are rapidly merging into a unified environment. App development will be threatened by a blended technology that makes it easier to create “content” for both the desktop Internet and the mobile Internet. And theoretically, whatever comes after those two platforms may also be impacted.
But this technology has to be put into place and adopted, and there are two critical steps that yet need to be completed. First, browsers need to implement some new standards that make it easier for Websites to publish content in a simplified way so that the user-agent (the browser) can select the components it needs. Google’s Chrome team has already implemented at least some of these changes and more are promised. Other browser teams are working on providing solutions.
And the good news for Website owners is that you won’t have to rewrite all your HTML code. Better yet, taking advantage of new features will require only a small amount of coding. That is because the browsers will do much of the work for you. Of course, most people are still using older browsers that don’t support the new HTML features. And that is why developers are looking at ways of implementing new options with minimal changes to code. You don’t have to worry about your Websites breaking.
Once these building blocks are in place you can expect to see a swarm of new development tools and Website plugins that take advantage of the new features. Building a mobile-capable desktop Website will not only become much easier, it will quickly become the preferred method of development for many people with limited time and resources.
What this means is that your Website will become a mobile app. When the plugins start hitting the CMS marketplaces people who run blogs and forums will have the option of upgrading their sites to become mobile apps. There will be limitations, of course, and compromises. Some companies will continue to invest in dedicated mobile apps, but the appified Website will be very appealing to many small marketers who have watched the app user base explode over the past two years.
And let’s face it: most mobile apps create horrible user experiences anyway. The lack of a decent keyboard makes the typical smart phone or tablet PC a terrible weapon in the information wars. You can snap pictures all day long and upload them to social sharing sites but at the end of the day it’s hard to sell what you’re marketing if you only have to rely on pictures.
Search engine optimization will take a crazy turn somewhere along the way. Just as marketers are starting to hear distant thunderings about new “mobile app search” technologies and asking themselves if they will have to learn how to optimize for these services, the mobile app itself is being threatened with extinction. But optimization for the blended desktop will have to expand its skill sets just a little bit.
Canonicalization, which everyone has now sort of figured out, will become more complicated. After all, if you can publish everything in one place (your Web server) then what will people be searching for? Mobile users will still want to download your content as an app-like thing, and so the search engine will have to know what to look for. Desktop users will still want to browse your site the old-fashioned way, and so the search engine will have to know how to distinguish that from the mobile-content.
It won’t be so simple as designating a special URL for mobile (although you still have the option to do so, but duplicate content may become an issue again without proper canonicalization). Then again, there are no proposals for differentiated canonicalization on the table right now, so expect the search engines to have a little trouble getting things sorted out for a while.
Security, which Google has made an important issue, is about to be turned on its ear. All the user-agent developers have bought into Google’s nonsense hook, line, and sinker. They are seriously tossing around ideas about how to move as much of the Web onto HTTPS as possible (some of them are not ready to see all the blogs go into encrypted mode, but some of them are). From a user’s point of view there is absolutely no need for this blog to be encrypted. You will never be asked to log in, so why should you experience a slower Internet connection (which is one consequence of using HTTPS)?
Well, just as Google is on the verge of convincing everyone that the Web will somehow be magically safer if we all use HTTPS on our Websites (never mind the fact that the criminals keep hacking into databases and stealing the information you handed over via encrypted HTTPS connections) — new technology is being developed that will enable hackers to eavesdrop on your computer as you type your password. Now, the researchers who are developing this technology are hoping to use it to persuade PC manufacturers to improve the shielding on their machines. But even if that scenario plays out in the best possible light (i.e., the PC manufacturers bring new shielding to market this year) it will take ten years for 98% of all existing computers today to be replaced.
So in about a year HTTPS will be rendered obsolete as far as protecting passwords while you type them into your laptop at the local coffee shop. When news stories begin hitting the Internet about how HTTPS has failed (again) to make the Web a safer place, anyone who was riding that hay wagon into town can expect to be tarred and feathered by the business owners who listened to them.
Security is important, to be sure. But encrypting your passwords as you type them into your browser is equivalent to guarding the bridges on a long, empty highway and doing nothing about those immense stretches of road. And now the guards at the bridges are about to be bribed anyway. So you have to evaluate just how important it is to convert a non-commercial Website to use HTTPS. This has become an SEO issue because of Google’s announcement last year that they were giving a small boost to sites using HTTPS.
Protocol canonicalization has now become a real issue for every Website that serves differentiated content on its HTTP and HTTPS services. There have already been real reports of Websites showing the wrong (and often broken) content in Google’s search results because the search engine was able to crawl into the HTTPS side and find all or some of the HTTP content there. You don’t have to stand beside me and yell “down with HTTPS!” in this fight. What you need to do is keep calm and watch for problems, then figure out how to fix them. You can always undo whatever is done. Well, almost always.
Changing a site to HTTPS should not be a disaster but it will be a mistake in many cases because if your site is already leading the pack in your field of queries then getting an extra boost won’t do you any good. And causing your site to run slower will not make your users happy, to be sure.
And then you have to ask what it will mean when a blended Website is downloaded onto a mobile device. The site will run from a local cache as much as the Javascript can enable it to do so. But if the user “logs in” on the local device, should your Web server honor the cookie (or whatever token is used for maintaining persistency) or should it force the user to re-authenticate? If an encrypted token is sent across the wire it will have a footprint. One of these theoretical hackers lurking in the back of the coffee shop could grab the token and send it from his own computer to your site. He won’t have to know any logins or passwords.
You see, Timmy, once we have a blended Website we’ll be tempted to create APIs for just about everything. You want more blog posts? Just click HERE and the browser client will use the API to fetch exactly the post you want. The API may depend on a token to maintain persistence. The user-agent developers are trying to do their part to protect the privacy of the connection, but the site owners and developers can still do their part to leave the data out in the open. As an SEO it’s not really your job to handle security, but you need to understand it well enough to help spot trouble before it happens.
So we’ll cover some of these topics later this year as the technologies start hitting the market. Or, if they fail to catch on, we won’t say a word.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
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White Hat Link Earning Techniques
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