The following is my quick response to the ”theory” that optimizing for mobile search engines is just a myth. Just thought I’d list off a few things that makes optimizing for mobile devices different than optimizing for desktop devices.

Here’s 6 things (off the top of my head) that makes your mobile search strategy different than your desktop strategy. Sure there are many similarities between the two, but at the same time far too many differences to overlook.

1. Mobile Content- Sorry no iFrames, no Flash, no redirects, no auto-refresh, no banners, no popups, no spacing graphics, and please no tables. Your content development strategy is different with mobile in mind, it’s so much more than just serving up different CSS.

You need to optimize your content for mobile devices, mobile users, and mobile crawlers. All of which require varying types of content, as well as quantities of it.

2. Search Position- Let’s talk SERPs for a second. All positions are not created equal (that’s what she said). Adwords aside, #3 in a Google desktop search isn’t the same as #3 in a Google mobile SERP. Think that’s going to affect clicks? You betcha.

You just might have a different optimization strategy now that you know there is less visible real estate on a mobile device. Getting to that #1 spot is more important than ever, and pick up a few juicy site links while you’re at it too.

3. Quality Signals- There are different bots that crawl desktop and mobile content, and they have different signals of quality. Code weight, deprecated elements, rich media, and page load times all vary in weight from one algorithm to another. There might be one algorithm sometime in the future, but right now ignoring either one could cost you.

4. Mobile Keywords- User search behavior is driven by simplicity, as well as the device on which they are searching. For example, people search Facebook by asking their social graph a question, yet on Google desktop they’d translate the same basic query into a long tail keyword string. Shorter queries, natural language, and voice searches, are all part of mobile search behavior.

5. iTunes App Store- Search engines can be social, they can video, they can be viral, and they can even be iTunes. You don’t just want your app to get built and sit on the shelf, you want it to rank well. That means you’ll need somebody who knows apple search optimization, guess you could call them an AEO’er.

6. Mobile Code- What about valid code and 508 compliance? Everything is magnified on mobile, and that means stricter requirements when coding, and less room for errors. Pages full of errors render poorly on desktop, slowly in mobile, and gives IE6 spasms. Clean code gives mobile spiders less indigestion.

The big finish…

Mobile search has different behavior, content, algorithms, and keywords, just to name a few. It’s something you need to plan for, code for, and yes even optimize for. While mobile and desktop have common points, and could merge sometime in the future, they haven’t yet.

I can’t imagine why anybody would want to ignore optimizing for mobile search, even if he is just stuck in semantics.