What is your Internet-surfing tool of choice? Smartphone? iPad? E-reader? In 2010, “Queen of the ‘Net” Mary Meeker predicted that by 2015, more consumers will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than to desktop PCs. It appears she was right. Every day more and more smartphones get activated and more websites are producing smartphone-optimized content.

SEO Optimization for Google?

This threw Google for a loop. If every site had an entirely separate experience for mobile and desktop users, which site would actually be the one worthy of the incoming link? Would the value of the link pass to the mobile site? If so, how much rank value and why?

In June, Google announced its intentions to encourage developers to create a web experience that adapts to the user’s platform, whether it’s a mobile device or a desktop PC. You’re going to hear a lot about “Responsive Web Design” in the months to come as everyone, especially E-commerce web designers create desktop- and smartphone-optimized sites in order to have the best chance of performing well in Google’s search results.

Responsive web design is the approach that a design should be flexible enough to adapt to the screen size and platform of the visiting user. The technique builds web pages that alter how they look regardless of the device accessing it. With responsive web design, local advertising for small business in Philadelphia is more affordable since Google will be able to discover your content more efficiently with only one website to crawl and index rather than multiple versions.

In summary, the variety of screen sizes and resolutions widens every day, and of course, creating a different version of a website that targets each individual device is neither practical nor cost effective. Responsive web design addresses this problem head on.