Almost 98% of the 42 million plus smartphone users in the US visit their favorite websites. If your website isn't optimized for mobile devices, you're missing a major opportunity.

There are 42.7 million smartphone users in the US and all but 2% of them visit their favorite websites using their phones. If you're website isn't optimized for mobile devices, you're, literally, turning away all but a tiny fraction of your potential customers. Here's some tips to get started making your website mobile friendly.

Sub-Domain Vs. .mobi

There's debate over which style is better when optimizing your site for mobile devices. Using a sub-domain is fairly easy to implement. Setting up your mobile site this way will allow you to manage the account through the same management system you use for your original website.

One company who has taken advantage of this sub-domain option is Target. By using their web analytics to see what their customers are browsing, Target can customize their sub-domain to have only key information accessed through their mobilized version of their site.

The other option is the .mobi platform. This domain is set up specifically for mobile browsers, and may have an edge for SEO purposes. According to dotmobi.mobi, "Because every .mobi domain registered gets its own entry in the Internet Zone File -- the files that search engines use to start their crawls -- your site will automatically perform better than any other naming convention."

Another perk for smaller companies is that since .mobi is still fairly new, there are great names still available. This can allow smaller companies to get a domain name they wanted with a .com but it wasn't available.

Read the complete story at InformationWeek SMB.