The Evolution of Mobile Searches with AMP

You might be hearing a lot of SEO efforts going in AMP. Wondering what AMP might be and how it will affect your business in the future? Your AMP guide is here.

Definition

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a Google-backed open source tool to improve the performance of web contents and ads. The main aim of AMP is to help pages load quickly on mobile devices. On February 2016, Google officially integrated AMP listings into its mobile search results.

Since most of the population have started using and accessing all content on their phones AMP plays a major role.

The 3 core components of AMP

AMP HTML is a under HTML with certain restrictions for boosts performance.

1. The AMP JS is a library that ensures the fast loading of AMP HTML pages.
2. Google AMP Cache can be used to serve cached in AMP HTML pages.

2 major advantages of AMP

1. Accelerated performance – As AMP is an open source format, the load time of web pages and ads load instantly without glitches. The user experience is extremely smooth and extremely engaging.
2. Increased flexibility – With the integration of AMP you have the liberty to decide how exactly you want your content to look and also what technology platform to use. Performance gets enhanced due to flexibility.

When you integrate AMP it will appear in the search results with a special “AMP” designation.

AMP and its effect on your site?

There are two versions of the page. One is the original version and the other is an AMP version.

There is certain restriction with AMP when it came into existence. AMP does not allow other elements like JavaScript, or other on-page comments and some things that cannot be implemented by AMP. With iframes, there are hacks to get a solution to this situation.

You have to keep all restrictions in mind when you make an AMP template. When using GIFs or other images you need separate AMP extensions. There is also a custom tag that must be used to embed locally hosted videos via HTML5, those are called “amp-video”. That does not go for YouTube video though, to embed YouTube videos you use the extended component called “amp-youtube”.

AMP also allows embedding social media handles such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or others as their own extensions.

With the rise of ads and people using ad blockers, it has become quite difficult to advertise on the web. Ad blockers have been improving website load time which is an obvious advantage use by most users. AMP helps in this issue and help in effective ad monetization on mobile with a very user-centric approach.

AMP is an answer to the growing importance of the mobile web and optimized for website designs. The main goal of AMP is to bring faster, rendering web content with the help of mobile devices. AMP can also greatly improve search rankings and viewability.