Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, is the practice of optimising a website by improving internal and external aspects to increase your rankings in search engines. The majority of online daters use search engines to find their dating site of choice, and if your site isn’t up there, you’re missing out on an incredible opportunity to attract new traffic to your site. Investing in SEO adds value to your site, allowing you to gain targeted visitors as well as higher conversion rates.
There’s lots of ways to improve the SEO of your site.
- Keyword Search – Spend some time working out which keywords are used by the people you want to visit when they’re searching for a site, making sure these words are present in your site copy. A great helper is the Google Keyword tool, which shows you how popular and effective certain key terms are.
- Make navigation easy – Make sure your site has plenty of clear calls-to-action by building clear text links to every page within your site. Text links are important as search engines can’t follow image links or flash links.
- Get links from trusted, relevant sources – Think of links as ‘votes’ for your site; you can’t rank well without them. Links must be relevant to the content of your site – you should focus on quality rather than quantity.
- Write original content – It’s important not to copy content from other sites – more often than not, duplicate content will be filtered out by search engines.
- Social Media – Publish links to all of your posts on social media sites; Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest work exceptionally well for blog sharing and have a really positive effect on search rankings.
- Use description tags – The Meta Description Tag is shown on the search engine results page as the summary snippet for your website. Description tags are limited to 160 characters, including spaces. If you don’t use Description Tags, Google will choose for you what your listing says. Tell Google what you want it to show. Remember that content is KING! Building great content and keeping it up to date is the key to SEO. Search engines love blogs that are relevant and regularly refreshed.
Blogs are a great way to build interaction with your audience and they’re also pretty fun to do. Here are a few blog ideas to get you started.
- Online dating – getting started – This is a very open topic. You can write about the benefits of online dating and it also allows you to promote the features of your site such as writing diary entries, sending winks, sending messages, the search facility, plus lots more.
- Seasonal blogs – Christmas is just around the corner – why not use this as the focal point for your blog? Christmas date ideas are a hot topic; think ‘finding someone new to kiss under the mistletoe.’
- FAQ style blogs – A great way for encouraging your audience to be interactive – the possibilities are endless!
- Success stories – What better way to promote your site than by highlighting the success that other loved-up couples have found on it! Not only will this encourage new members to sign-up, but it also helps to build credibility for your brand.
It’s essential to keep your blog content fresh, updating it at least once every 2 weeks. If you don’t, you won’t see the positive affect of your SEO efforts and it will have no effect on your organic rankings.
If you have any questions about your SEO or would like some blog ideas, get in touch with your Partner Manager today and get on your way to SEO success!
Jessica Dimsdale, Partner Manager at WhiteLabelDating.com