Phone number usage on mobile web pages

I love usability, don’t you? Even the smallest touch to the user experience will worth more than the effort to users.

On the web pages, when I have to use phone numbers, I always add the dial code to my HTML. With that, you can allow your visitors to one-click on the phone numbers to dial or skype call easily.

The usage of this is a very simple code. After that, we will discuss some alternatives and the SEO posibilities of phone number usage on mobile web sites.

Usage Link

The protocol we are going to use is: tel

<a href="tel:90-537-111-22-33">(0537) 111 22 33</a>

or

<a href="tel:+905371112233">Click to call</a>

both are fine and tel: works just like as http: or mailto:

A country code is not required but could be nice to have it for sites with international traffic. Country codes can be preceded by a + but that is also not required.

Alternatives Link

Note that, tel: is not the only way to initiate a phone call with a link:

• callto: Just like tel: but used to initiate calls via the Skype application.
• auto-detected: Many browsers will automatically detect a phone number in the HTML and link it for you.
• sms: Skip the call and go straight to text message system.

Search Engine Optimization Link

To help search engines (lets say Google search and/or Google business) to understand the given phone number and crawl corretly, this kind of a code would be helpful:

<div itemscope itemtype="//schema.org/LocalBusiness">
  <h3 itemprop="name">Contact Information</h3>
  Phone: 
    <span itemprop="telephone">
      <a href="tel:+905371112233">
         537-111-22-33
      </a>
    </span>
</div>

Also if you do not want the search engines to follow your phone links, you can add rel="nofollow" to discourage from being followed and indexed.