You might have come across the term ‘AMP’ several times recently. This must have made you curious to find out what AMP stands for and implies. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. The AMP project has been designed by Twitter and Google. The task of AMP is to make mobile pages load really fast.

As a professional in an SEO company, you must be aware of the fact that an increasing number of users now surf the Internet from their smartphones. So, you must implement effective SEO techniques to optimize the mobile websites of your clients. This can improve the rankings of your client’s site, increase the traffic it receives and generate more revenues. This blog speaks about AMP, its use and impact on the ranking and success of a website.

AMP – An Idea

This project was announced by Google last October. AMP is an open-source initiative, dedicated to make the performance of mobile web better. It is not new for Google to come up with new strategies or projects. This new project was an answer to Apple News and Facebook’s Instant Articles. But, it is important for you to note and understand the difference between AMP and the other two initiatives. To use the other two initiatives, you must enter into a partnership with Facebook or Apple. But, you can use Google’s new initiative for a mobile-friendly web to create web pages, without fulfilling the above criterion.

Whenever Google comes up with a new initiative, the SEO world wakes up to a chaotic morning. There are fervent musings on what the initiative means, how it can be used or implemented and what can be its possible effects. The same contemplation began among the professionals of every Indian SEO company, when Google announced about AMP. However; the contemplation did not last long this time. Soon after, Google came up with information on the  key features of AMP, what it consists of and how it is going to affect a user’s experience of using the Internet on a mobile device.

Check out the following to get a deep insight into AMP.

# Understanding AMP

Let me begin by giving you all the important details of AMP.

• Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is a stripped-down version of HTML. It is basically a very lightweight HTML page, which loads very fast on mobile devices. As it is an open source project by Google and Twitter, different elements have been added to maintain the openness of this initiative.
• As AMP is a re-imagined version of HTML, it is also referred to as AMP HTML. AMP rules out all those elements that can cause mobile pages to load slowly, such as third-party scripts and JavaScript.
• According to sources from Google, a web page created with the help of AMP HTML can load fifteen to eighty-five percent quicker than its non-AMP version.

Google had also made it convenient for web publishers to start using AMP. For that, the search engine has created tutorials to help experts of an SEO company in understanding the creation of an AMP page.

• The whole idea behind the initiative of AMP is to boost speed and readability. Now, when people use the Internet from mobile devices, things, such as images do not load until scrolled into view. This task is performed in mobile phones by JavaScript. SEO experts are anticipating that there is going to be a time, when the operating systems will have in-built JavaScript libraries. Moreover, all of it will be so heavily cached that Google will not need to fetch anything for you from anywhere, when you load web pages on mobile devices.
• You can put /amp at the end of any new post on a website, which is created using AMP HTML. If you do so, the displayed post will be linked to the AMP HTML in the source code. This is what people are referring to as hosted AMP. This is not linked to Google and it can make the web pages load faster.
• Along with this, Google has also come up with a hosted cached platform, which is marked with the Gstatic. As a result, when we see websites coming up on Google’s search results, the version of the web page, which loads is hosted by gstatic.com.

• Another point you must note is that, the pages you host by using AMP yourself and the ones that are hosted using a cached version around the Internet should not contain any duplicate content.
• Sources from Google have also confirmed that experts from an Indian SEO company can give their own adverts in the cached version of the web pages. The details of this provision are yet to come, but it is deduced that you can provide adverts from different advertising platforms and receive all the revenue.
• The cached version also allows you to use Analytics. However; the version, which has been rolled out allows you till now to use only a tracking pixel.

# The Impact of AMP on Search Rankings

Every SEO professional is now eager to know the impact of AMP on search results. This can help them in optimizing the websites and boosting ranks.

• With the increase in the number of users using the Internet on the mobile phones and tablets, it is mandatory for websites to be mobile-friendly. Google had made this clear by its ‘Mobilegeddon’ algorithm in the previous year. If websites are not mobile-friendly, they do not get high rankings anymore.
• Hence, if the website you are optimizing cannot pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, it will appear on the second or the third page of the search results.
• Hence, professionals from every SEO company can see that the Accelerated Mobile Pages designed to load quickly on mobile phones and helping people to have a better user experience are getting higher search rankings.
• Moreover, the websites using AMP are highlighted by the search engine with a tiny green lightning-bolt. I think you can understand the implications of this mark – users surfing the Internet from their mobile phones or tablets will automatically select the sites that come with the lightning-bolt.

In the event that the website you have optimized has this mark, more mobile users are  going to access it on their phones. As a result, the site will automatically generate more traffic.

• The AMP sites are also the ones that are going to be featured on the Google News Carousel. These sites will get priority on mobile searches. Thus, as more and more websites start publishing their content, it becomes more important for you to be a part of the AMP network. Otherwise, the websites you are optimizing will be completely out of competition. Professionals from every Indian SEO company should surely keep this in mind.
• Loading time is a very important factor for your ranking on search engine result pages because, on an average, mobile users do not wait for more than six seconds for a page to load. Therefore to get a higher rank, the pages you are optimizing should load faster than they usually do. A fast-loading page and subsequent higher rank are also going to increase the number of visitors who visit the website.
• Thus, it can be well-understood that AMP pages will boost search results. Keeping in mind the earlier Mobilegeddon and the recent AMP, it can be gauged that Google will continue prioritizing mobile-friendly media even more in its future updates.
• Pages that load at a high-speed are not only going to bring visitors or traffic to the sites you are optimizing, but will also decrease your bounce rate. You may argue that the bounce rate is not the most important ranking factor. Yes, that is indeed true. But, a low bounce rate can help search engines in understanding that a website offers what it claims it offers and as readers find it useful, they do not leave the site. Hence, I will suggest experts from every SEO company to focus on AMP for your blogs and articles as it can have a great impact on your reader retention rate.

# Using AMP on a WordPress Site

Are you wondering how you can use AMP on a WordPress website? Let me share with you an attractive feature of AMP here. It takes only about five minutes to integrate AMP into your WordPress site.

• The first step of this process involves installing the AMP WordPress plugin from Automattic.
• Once the installation is over, activate the plugin, so that it attaches /amp on all your pages. However, do not think that the plugin will redirect users who are using the Internet from mobile phones or tablets to the /amp pages.

• Hence, the next step for integrating AMP involves editing your .htaccess file by using an FTP program like, Filezilla.
• Once you are done with the three aforementioned steps, you can check whether your/amp pages are working efficiently or not. You are also going to get a message stating that the AMP validation has been successful.
• Finally, you must engage in editing the CSS, so that the Accelerated Mobile Pages look more like the website, of which it is a part.

# Integrating AMP on a Website that is Not WordPress

If the website a professional from an Indian SEO company optimizes is not a WordPress one, it can be a bit difficult for you to integrate AMP. But, finally it can prove to be rewarding.

For a site, which is not a WordPress one, you have to go to the site of the AMP project and learn how to integrate it in the correct process.

# Understanding AMP JS and Google AMP Cache

Now, let me give you some details of AMP JS and Google AMP cache. 

• All AMP’s best performance practices are implemented by the AMP JS library. It manages the loading of resources and gives SEO experts the custom tags necessary for loading the pages quickly.
• One of the advantages of using this kind of optimization technique is that, it makes everything coming from external resources asynchronous. Therefore, nothing in the page can hinder it from loading quickly.

• Other techniques that fall within AMP’s best performance practice are pre-calculation of the layout of every element in a page before it is loaded, sandboxing all the iframes and disabling slow CSS selectors.
• As an expert from an SEO company, you must also know that Google AMP cache is a content delivery network based on proxy delivering all valid AMP documents. The task of this delivery network is to fetch AMP HTML pages, cache them and automatically improve the performance of the pages.
• When the AMP cache is used, the document, all images and JS files load from the same origin and use HTTP 2.0 for high-efficiency.
• There is also an in-built validation system within the cache, which provides confirms that a page is sure to work and is not dependent on any external source.
• A series of assertions are run by this validation system, which confirms that the markup in a page meets the specifications of AMP HTML.
• Another version of the Google AMP cache can log to the console of a browser different kinds of validation errors, when the page is loading. This can help you to understand how performance and user experience can be affected by any kind of complex changes in the code, which you are using.

This is what Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages is all about. As a professional in an Indian SEO company, you must understand the importance of integrating AMP into the websites of your clients. Only then, the sites are going be user-friendly, get high rankings and attract significant amount of traffic.

Share With: