In order to make the most of your web-presence, you need more than just a site that has an SEO friendly design for desktop users. More people than ever are using their mobile devices to get online and make purchases. In order to reach these customers, you need to think of your mobile SEO and desktop SEO as two separate but interrelated strategies.

Here are five key things to think about as you develop an independent mobile SEO strategy:

The User Experience Drives Everything: The number one factor that drives a successful mobile SEO strategy is giving the user a positive experience. Not only has Google signaled that this plays a factor when you want to improve a search engine ranking, but it also helps to generate conversions.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly: Mobile sites can be responsive to adapt to readers on mobile devices, or you can create your own dedicated site for mobile users. There are pros and cons to each approach, but it’s important that you have a dedicated way for mobile users to access your site. Doing so will greatly increase your potential for conversions from mobile users.

Have a Clean Design: Having a website design with lots of graphics and other design elements can create major problems for mobile users. With limited screen sizes, clutter can keep people from seeing the most important information on your site. It can also make pages slow to load and make mobile users quickly decide to leave your page and go somewhere else.

Consider How Mobile Users Search: A mobile user likely won’t type in a search with your city name; they’ll almost always type (or speak) a search that says to find something “near” them. Because of this, making sure that your business’ location is part of your SEO strategy and not just a city name can pay dividends.

Grasp User Intent: Mobile users are more likely to be looking for something near them. This means that making sure your location, hours and phone number are easily accessible on the site and through Google+ is critical.

Attempting to determine the proper tactics for mobile SEO has been a mystery in the past. Google has given few clues about how to approach mobile design as part of professional website development. But things have changed in recent years as Google has started to give some major hints on the types of elements that they consider important for mobile sites. There are three ways to handle mobile content and Google has recommendations for each method:

Use a New URL

In many cases, web designers decide to direct mobile users to a completely different URL to access content. When this happens, Google would like to see the link canonical tag on mobile pages to direct to the desktop version of the site and the link alternate tag on desktop pages to direct to the mobile version of the site.

Google also wants separate user agent redirection lists to be set up for different types of mobile users. For example, a user of a Samsung Android phone will be directed by the server differently than the user of an iPhone. This integrates responsive design into the equation, changing the layout to fit the specific screen width of the device.

Same URL With Different HTML

Another way to approach mobile design is to use the same URL for desktop and mobile versions of the site but have the two sites have different HTML. When doing this, Google recommends adding a Vary HTTP header to the server response. This will allow Google to read and crawl both the mobile and desktop versions of the URL.

Same URL and HTML

This is the preferred method of handling mobile and desktop sites by Google. In this case, you would use CSS3 media queries to create different looks for the site. Google prefers this method for several reasons. Two of the most common reasons for implementing this approach is because it brings all ranking metrics to one URL and it is very easy to implement.