Posted Apr 6, 2011 by Joel Sutherland

What is an “App”

An “app” is a software application that is written in the native language of a particular platform. This has some tremendous advantages:

• By using native code, the application can run with high performance.
• It is easy to follow the User Experience conventions using provided libraries
• The app is available in an App Store
• It can work offline
• The App can be launched in a single step

What is a Mobile Website

A mobile website is just a website that has been optimized for mobile browsing. It can be reached through a phone’s web browser directly.  There are some great advantages to doing a mobile site:

• One mobile site can work on any mobile platform
• It is generally faster and cheaper to develop a mobile site
• A mobile site can just be a ‘version’ of your primary website.
• It is becoming possible to embed an Mobile site in an App using technology like Phonegap
• Customers can google you and land on your mobile site
• Since it’s a website, it can be easily updated through a CMS

There are some disadvantages too:

• They aren’t written in native code, so performance can be an issue
• You cannot access all of the phones features (camera, etc) that are available to apps
• It requires some number of steps for a customer to bookmark your mobile site
• It is hard to charge for access or usage

Our Recommendation: Mobile Websites over Apps

There are a number of reasons that we generally recommend putting your resources towards mobile websites before Apps.

Discover-ability

When people are looking for information, they go to Google, not the app store. A mobile website is a better way to reach more customers.

Cost

It is generally much less expensive to build a mobile website so the bang-for-the-buck is much higher. You also get to develop one version and it works on all smartphones.

Increasing Performance

As mobile browsers become faster, the performance gap between apps and websites is closing.

Future Safety

An individual platform may disappear, but the web will not. You can be sure that a mobile site that looks good on a 4″ screen today will also look good in 5 years.

SEO is an ever-changing game–which is why online marketers are increasingly depending on neuromarketing to draw and engage new users or customers.

A Panda and a Penguin walk into a bar–and send your Google search ranking plummeting a few hundred places.

If you didn’t laugh at the above, that’s because it’s not really a joke. It’s actually a serious situation for many Internet marketers (like this one), who have had to completely change their SEO tactics because of Google’s sweeping changes.

Over the past couple of years, Google has completely changed the game when it comes to SEO with a series of algorithm updates labeled “Panda” and “Penguin.” Gone are the days when you could stuff your website with low-quality articles packed with the right keywords or link spam exchanges to boost your Google rankings.

Today the game is all about quality–content that’s authentic, informative, and, most of all, attractive to your intended audience. In short, we need to stop thinking about SEO as “search engine optimization” and more as “social engagement optimization,” as Greg Henderson at SEO Desk put it.

So, the question becomes, how do you play nice with Panda and Penguin and turn your website into a more attractive animal? Read more…