Recently Google began the GoMo initiative, an online campaign to increase awareness of the importance of having a mobile-specific version of your website for your visitors.

WHAT IS A MOBILE SITE AND WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?
Just because you can see your desktop site on a mobile phone doesn’t mean it’s mobile-friendly. Mobile sites are designed for the small screen, with the needs of mobile users in mind. A mobile-friendly site can help your business connect with customers and drive conversions.

The GoMo website includes useful information and powerful statistics to show you why going mobile should be an important part of your online business plan & future.

It will also allow you to test your website, and will give you a ranking of 1-4 in terms of the quality of the mobile experience you’re offering visitors.

Lastly it provides a small, non-WordPress list of vendors that assist in building mobile sites. We’re not yet listed, but that will likely change, and folks like us will be included.

Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Sites

Google also recently announced that mobile site optimization now affects your AdWords Quality Score. This means that serving ads to mobile visitors with a mobile-optimized website will earn you a higher rank.

The AdWords system will automatically visit your landing page, and evaluate your site as viewed by smartphones. However, if you already have a mobile site, we recommend confirming with your webmaster that you’ve configured your server to show the mobile-optimized site when the AdWords mobile User-Agent is detected.

So in both cases, WPtouch & WPtouch Pro powered WordPress websites score perfect and will help you both with your business presence online in an increasingly mobile ‘webscape’, while also improving your Adwords quality & revenue.

Google Gears is now out of Beta for Safari, and with that news I decided to install it today and see how it worked with WordPress.

For those who aren’t in the know:

“Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

Google’s own web-apps take advantage of Gears, and other CMS’s are adding the ability to take advantage of it. Google writes:

“Gears is an incremental improvement to the web as it is today. It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline. Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps. It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard. We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone”

As of version 2.6 WordPress has enabled users of Gears to enhance the speed of the WordPress admin, and allow for offline publishing of entries.

Having installed it today and used for the afternoon I can say that I’ll be using Gears with Safari on all WordPress blogs going forward- the sheer speed in load time for operations in the admin make it worthwhile.

I’m mostly connected to the internet everywhere I work, so I have no need for offline publishing? but the addition of the local cache for WordPress was a very savvy move for us power users and developers, and I’m glad Google has supported Safari in it’s efforts early in the project.