What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the active practice of optimising a website with the goal of achieving a higher ranking in search engines.
SEO is critical for driving traffic to your site. The majority of web traffic is driven by the biggest commercial search engines – Google, Bing & Yahoo. If your site can’t be found by search engines or your content can’t be indexed their database, you could be missing out on valuable traffic and potential new members!
What you need to do to get started
1) Decide on a concept – When you’re deciding on a concept for your dating site before you purchase the domain, take into consideration whether people will actually search for the keywords it contains. Your Partner Manager will be able to assist you with this and make suggestions about the niches and keywords that are currently performing well.
2) Keyword research – When choosing keywords to target, use words that not only match your chosen site name and/or concept, but also that people are likely to use to start off their initial search for an online dating site. We recommend using Google’s Keyword Planner to find suggested keywords. By entering a variety of phrases that you believe people may use to find your site, the Keyword Planner will provide with you a selection of words and phrases that they believe match your suggested keywords. You may find that some words aren’t relevant to your concept, however, the words that have the largest amount of search traffic should be of the most interest to you.
3) Competitor analysis – After deciding on your keywords, have a look at what your competitors are ranking highly for and to see what they’re doing well and not so well. A simple Google search will provide the top results – if they appear at the top, it means they’re doing something right.
4) Create quality content – SEO done well is not about tricking Google into ranking your web page. It’s about creating content that users would want to find and helping Google to deliver the search results. The best way to rank well in search results is by creating quality content that is worthy of being ranked, as this is what the user who has created the search would consider to be of high quality and relevance.
The key to executing a good SEO strategy is to consider how search engines work, what people tend to search for and most importantly, which search engines are preferred by your target audience. The higher your site is ranked on the first page of search results, the more traffic to your site you’ll receive.