Bayshore Solutions' Account Manager, Meryl Heindenreich, shares incite on the different types of mobile websites and what Google is recommending and why.

1. Should I Have a Separate Mobile
Website?
Meryl Heindenreich
Account Manager

2. First Decision
1. To have a separate mobile site
2. Make your desktop website compatible with mobile devices.
• If you choose 1, you have to decide if your site will show something different
to each user depending on their device (dynamically serving different HTML
and CSS (styling) based on whether the user-agent is a mobile device or
desktop PC
• If you choose 2, your site will show the same thing (same HTML) to mobile
and desktop visitors, with only the CSS changing depending on the device
to ensure the page renders for optimal viewing

3. Google Recommendation
• 22% of all Google searches currently being made on mobile devices, and
mobile search set to exceed desktop search by 2015
• Google released their official recommendation for building Smartphone-
optimized websites: Responsive web design
Option 3: A responsive website design is the third configuration, where the
server sends the same HTML to every user, and CSS is used to change
how the page is displayed to a device using media queries

4. Why Responsive Web Design
Google is recommending responsive web designs for several reasons:
2. Having one URL for a piece of content (instead of a separate URL for the
mobile and desktop versions) makes it easier for your visitors to interact
with your content (commenting on it, sharing it, linking to it, etc).
3. Having one URL for a piece of content removes all issues of duplicate
content, or other points of confusion for search algorithms to determine how
to index your content.
4. No redirects will be necessary to get visitors to the right version of content
for their device, thus reducing load-speed, and the likelihood of errors –
which is good for SEO and for user-experience.
5. Googlebot can crawl and index content more efficiently with a responsive
design – resulting in more of your content being indexed and being kept up
to date for search results.

5. For help with the creation of your mobile-optimized website,
visit www.BayshoreSolutions.com.
Additional information: http://www.howtogomo.com/
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details