b'SMART OPERATIONSIs Your Website Ready to Become a Hot Potato?If your website does not render properly for the mobile bot, it will atPeterbest be buried in the search results. No business can afford this, anyPelland more than they can afford to expect customers to find their park with-out either GPS or a sign at their entrance.We have all gotten the phone callsability to move our websites to the top do need to understand is that, unless arate robots to spider websites, onefor many of us, on a daily basisfrom of the Googlesearch rankings for a fee. yourwebsiteismobile-friendly,its fordesktopandanotherformobile.the scammers who claim to have the Those are all scams. However, what you search engine ranking has probably suf- That has now changed, with the full im-fered recently. Even worse, if your web- plementation of mobile-first indexingsite is built to only function on desktop scheduled for March (postponed fromcomputers, Google may have dropped it September 2020, due to the COVID-19like a hot potato, all based upon the mo- pandemic). If your website does notbile-first indexing that Google has been render properly for the mobile bot, itgradually implementing in recent years. will at best be buried in the search re-Google is in the business of present- sults. No business can afford this, anying its users with the most relevant on- more than they can afford to expect cus-line content available. It was all the way tomers to find their park without eitherback in 2011 when mobile website traffic GPS or a sign at their entrance.first surpassed desktop traffic. According Ifitisanyconsolation,theBingto the most recent statistics, over 60% of search engine has no immediate plansGoogle searches are performed on mo- to introduce its own mobile-first index-bile devices. Those statistics are over a ing at this time, although it uses sepa-year old and have continued to rise. If ratemobileanddesktopspiders.your business has a customer base that However, Bing currently accounts foris on the road, the percentage of mobile less than 3% of online searches, as com-users will understandably skyrocket well pared to the nearly 92% share com-beyond that overall statistics. With those mandedbyGoogle,hencethenumbers in mind, it is pretty obvious importance of playing by Googles rules.why Google is not going to send its users Google wants to see the same con-to websites where the content is impos- tent on your website regardless of thesible to read and where the site is diffi- device with which it is being viewed.cult to navigate. This includes text, images, videos, links,Fortunately, Google reports that over META data and structured data. You70% of websites are already deemed to should not be presenting a stripped-be mobile-friendly. If your website is a down version of content to smartphonestraggler, it is time to take corrective users. In fact, the cached version of yourmeasures. Generally speaking, there is websitethatnowappearsinGoogleno simple fix. An old website that was Searchisnowthemobileversionofbuilt strictly for display on computers yoursitescontent.AlthoughGooglecannot be retrofitted to become mo- continues to support different ways ofbile-friendly. It is time to bite the bullet building mobile websites, it highly en-and have a new site built. courages the responsive framework andUntil recently, Google used two sep- highlydiscouragesseparatemobileURLs. (Remember the days when web-sites presented separate .mobi versionsof content?) With Google now indexingmobile versions of content, it makes in-finitely more sense to choose a respon-sive framework for your new website,where identical but reformatted con-tent is presented on every device.If your website is already responsive(or otherwise properly mobile-friendly),you should see little or no impact uponyour Google search ranking and youmay breathe a sigh of relief. If it is nec-essary for you to build a new site, hereare some of the issues to be avoided thatGoogle has identified as penalizing yoursearch ranking. Pages that load slowly on mobile de-vices. The average page on a websitetoday takes longer than 20 seconds toload on a smartphone. Google would liketo see that load time trimmed back tothree seconds, not an easy task to imple-ment. Most desktop users have broad-band Internet connections these days,and the broader rollout of 5G networksshould substantially trim load times. Low-quality images. It is importantthat image size and resolution be ade-quate for viewing on mobile devices. Missing ALT text. This issue is alsomission-critical for your site to be ADAcompliant. Missing page titles. The titles shouldSmart Operationsfrom page 3210 -April 2021Woodalls Campground Management'