Online Dating

This post is about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with particular focus on how it can be applied to a dating site, both regular dating sites and adult dating sites. It deals with the basics, an intermediate to advance SEO practitioner will not find much information he/she does not already know, however there are some dating site specific SEO resources you may find useful at the end of this article.
If you are completely new to SEO and looking for ways to improve your site popularity in search engines, you will find loads of useful information to get your site ranking well. The article will attempt to define search engine optimisation the way the author understands it and then discuss the two main parts to SEO, the conclusion gives tips on how to carry our basic optimisation on both regular and adult dating sites.

To begin from the beginning, perhaps we should attempt to define what SEO is in the hope that the definition will point us to where we need to be.
SEO, or to call it its full name, Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to a process whereby the components of a website such as the graphics, the textual contents including how site layout is optimised to ensure Search Engines crawls and ranks the site highly for topic the site is about.

On-Page and Off-Page Factors
The two main things you need to do to get your dating site ranking well can be divided into  On-Page and Off-Page factors. On-Page (probably best called On-Site as it has to be applied to all pages on the entire sites). On-Page factors will be examined first.

On Page Dating Site SEO Factors
Page title optimisation
Title tags of your page is the first thing visitors see both when they visit your site and when the see a listing of your site in search engines,  its is very important that a lot of thoughts is put into your title tags.

Title tags (along with description and keywords tags is know as meta tags) needs to contain the most important contents of your page and your business page for example if your site is called Ozami Dating and the page the you are writing the title tag for is about how to find love, you title tag should look something like this:   Title: How to find love online – Ozami Dating

Description tags – In the meta tags, Title tag is followed by description. This should expand on the title tag for example you description could be something like this:
Description: Ozami Dating shows you how to find love online by introducing you to our super duper online dating questionnaire.

Keywords – This is the 3rd most important elements in the title tags, some SEO argue that it is obsolete, other argues that some search engines still use keywords. It certainly won’t do any harm to include keywords in your meta tags. Example of what keywords could look like follows:

Keywords: how to find love, online dating, ozami dating, search for love.
……………To be continued in part 2—————

Resources you may find useful when doing SEO for dating site
*  Dating webmaster forum
*  Google webmaster tools
*

You have done all the hard parts, planning, analyzing, and designing. Now comes the implementation of usability testing. Throughout the previous analyses, there were most likely several negative findings. So many that it may be difficult to implement the changes to fix them all. In fact, you may not want to regardless of budget or time issues.

Develop Priorities

The next step is to create a list of priorities on what needs fixing first. Look for simple easy fixes, or try finding the ones that can affect most of your users. Fixing a poor Terms of Agreement page hardly compares to poorly done new user form or confusing navigation bar. A common side effect of fixing the larger issues first is that lesser issues become resolved on there own.

Another reason you might want to hold off on making all the fixes at once is that it may be difficult to determine what new changes made, make the greater impact. It’s easy to see improvements if all you did was move a menu to the left instead of the right versus moving the menu, redoing the menu’s organization, and changing the header all at the same time. Take little bites. It could be that moving to the left did work better for your users, but now using another feature has become more complex. Maybe the fix needed to be not moving the menu, but reorganizing it.

Test Again

Now comes the fun and ongoing part. Test and test again. A site is never really ever done. Even the big guns like eBay, Microsoft, or Google are constantly testing. I have been lucky enough to participate as a test subject for Google’s Adwords and AdSense. It’s the advantages to living nearby that I got to participate at Google I guess. Don’t forget, testing is one of the most important steps to building a website, and if you don’t do it don’t expect much. I’m guessing not everyone will like it.

This article was written for Temi by Rob Campbell of Best Web Image. Rob is a usability and web design consultant. You can contact Rob via the contact page on Best Web Image. You can discuss this article and other web design related issues at UK Webmaster Forum .

Submitting your content to Google Base does not affect your site ranking in Google search, it actually give you additional bite of the organic search engine traffic should your feed be accepted, it would appear at the top of Google search engine result (in addition to Google Base itself), competition to appear on Google search engine result is quite stiff, only three products from Google Base tends to make it to Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages.

Algorithm for ranking Google Base products is not as advance as the algorithm for Google search, it is more literal in Google Base, this should be taken into account when preparing your product feed. You should include factors relevant to your product especially the product name, model etc in your product title and description, the keywords you are targeting should also appear in the title and description.
The first 15 words are quite significant, put a lot of though into your product description. Do not stuff the description with keywords as this is frowned upon and could lead to your listing being penalized.

Google Base allows custom attributes, it is important that you use this carefully as it will help rank your product higher, users searching for product are said to search differently to searchers searching for information, for example, a searcher looking to buy gloves for a child could use  keywords like “gloves for a 10 year old” so if you added attribute such as “suitable for children aged 10-13 year old” your product is bound to be listed higher when the searchers looking for “gloves for a 10 year old” searches with the aforementioned key phrase.

Another optimisation tip to help you rank well in Google Base is images, by adding relevant images to your product you increase your click-through rates. The image should be a high resolution representation of the product or services you are offering, adding a generic image will not have significant impact on your product CTR. And finally, Google product search uses an eBay style rating system where your customer leave feedback about their purchase experience with your company, try and get as much good rating as possible as this will positively impact your rating in Google Base.

Useful Google Base related information
* Google Base homepage : http://www.google.com/base/
*  Shopping Cart with automatic Google Base export : www.bosscart.co.uk
*  Discuss Google Base : http://www.webmasterserve.com/ecommerce/