Phone number usage on mobile web pages

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

phone number usage on mobile

Published in: 31 Eki 2017   Under: Code

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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.

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.

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.

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.