By now, as an online entrepreneur, you will have come across a very interesting fact regarding people and the way they access the internet: over 80% of the world is online using a mobile device.

That’s right; more people use their mobile phones and tablets – overwhelmingly so – to visit websites than they do using their laptops or PCs.

This means, an overwhelming number of your customers will be on their phones when they come to visit your website. So, we ask: has your website been optimized for these users?

If your answer is “no,” we have listed  ten points to help you get to that point now with the hopes that you won’t take too long to implement them – your business could be at stake.

They are:

1. Redesign Your Website: take a look at your website using a mobile device to check if anything doesn’t look or work like it is supposed to. If you spot any mistakes, correct them. If you can’t bring your whole site to look like it is supposed to, then you might need to create a secondary website that caters to just the mobile device users.
2. Cut Down on Text: although common sense would drive you to add more and more text to your website, there are times – you should know – when that is not necessarily true.

Although SEO and SEM strategies make it an integral part of their methodology, having too much content on a page that is going to be looked at on a mobile phone, will only result in severe headaches – for the visitors, i.e.

Therefore, cut down on the text whenever you can, use as little words as possible to get your point across and add a few pictures or images (without sacrificing your load time).

3. Make Your Lists Shorter: people searching for something on a mobile device need answers now. Therefore, make sure you present them with the “Best Three” instead of the “Top Ten” to facilitate easy decision making. If your list is longer than that, simply break it into two pages and let the reader decide if they want to be bothered with the remaining items.
4. Do Not Cram Everything In: the bad thing about a mobile page is that it is too small; there is nothing you can do about that. You will need to be very selective on what you will want to display and even have to forgo some stuff. But, the cardinal sin would be to cram everything in and then make it difficult for the visitors to even navigate your site.

Buttons and links should be big enough to be clicked by fingers (even chubby ones) – without the need to zoom in [too much]. If you can’t create big links, then keep the little ones far apart so that the visitors don’t click them by mistake.

5. Make Sure Your Sites Match: if you had to create a new site for mobile users, make sure everything matches between both your regular-sized site and the new, miniature one. Nothing looks tackier than sites that do not match and having discrepancies won’t help with your branding efforts.
6. Create New CSS and Code For Them: don’t be too lazy to create new fonts and sizes for your new mobile site. Having huge fonts on little screens will be a total waste of your space and the viewers’ time. If there is any Flash content on your site (which really shouldn’t considering it is an SEO no-no and just looks, well, flashy) make sure you replace them with HTML. Don’t forget about 30% of mobile users own iPhones, and Apple Inc. says their devices don’t support Flash content (and they have no intentions of changing that decision any time soon).
7. Cut Down on Forms: be considerate to your visitors and try to make their life a little bit easier by cutting down on the amount of text they have to type in. Nothing can be as frustrating as having to type in lengths of letters only to be rejected due to a misspelling which was caused by having to type using a mobile phone’s keyboard in the first place.
8. Cut Out Popups: If popup ads are annoying while using a PC or a laptop you can only imagine how maddening they can be when they come up on that tiny screen and you have to go all the way up there and tap on that tiny “X” mark to get rid of it – you will fail half of the time and end up opening another page. Simply enraging.
9. Don’t Forget They Are Holding A Device Than Can Make Calls: it’s funny how web designers forget that the people who are visiting the site are doing so using a mobile device… which can be used to make a telephone call. This means, along with the “email us” or “follow this link to find out more” suggestions, there should be a few “click-to-call” buttons. It makes it easier for everyone involved.
10. Think SEO-For-Phones: the keywords that people use when on their phones will obviously be shorter than those of the PC/Laptop type. Hence, think like a mobile-user when you set out on your SEO trails.