Google made it clear a couple of years ago that their focus will continue to be on the mobile device users’ experience. It makes senses since in 2014 mobile usage started to surpass desktop usage. There is no slowing down and now in 2016 the majority of Internet users are searching the web using a smartphone or a tablet instead of a regular computer.

What does it mean for your website and for search engines?

• First, you must make sure your site is mobile responsive. It does not matter who your customer base is. It simply needs to be responsive otherwise your website will be penalized by search engines in the form of poor or no ranking.
• Second, it means that Google and other SE players will continue to adjust their algorithm to cater to mobile searches.

Today we are discussing APM which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google’s team is saying that, though this is a new project, it is not part of the ranking calculation. Hummmm! Here, at Business Website Center, we say “it is not yet part of their algorithm”.

What it is:

On www.AMPProject.org, it describes the term as follows:

“The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.”

AMP is a new manner to develop web pages using specific AMP HTML or JavaScript code. Google provides webmasters with a library of JS scripts, HTML markups, Metadata code and other HTML tags. In addition there is Google AMP Cache which  saves a copy of AMP built-pages. By being cached by Google they download even faster.

All of this means new coding techniques to learn for your programing team. Google is really getting more involved into the coding world and , since they are the top search engine, programming teams should pay to attention to APM if they want to stay relevant.

What it does:

By using this AMP HTML and JS code for text heavy-pages (examples: news, articles, blog posts, videos, GIFs, stories, informative content, etc.) you ensure that the page performs at its best on a mobile device. That means it downloads very quickly on a smartphone and it is easy to read and maneuver. This benefits the end user and makes his/her experience more pleasurable. Again Google is looking at ensuring the best user experience on mobile devices. In addition AMP is supposed to enable publishers to distribute their content everywhere on the Internet very quickly. This is where we think that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in.

If the content is being delivered more quickly by Google, does not it mean that Google is giving it more attention, visibility therefore better indexation?

More than ever before Google is focusing on the end user’s experience making sure that on a mobile device content is delivered in the best and fastest manner possible. This focused approach has made them the leader in the Search Engine industry and our team is watching closely this new AMP with great interest.