by Zima

A few weeks ago SkaDate Dating Software team asked me to share a few Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips with our clients and other readers of this blog. It seems that the addition of automated SEO functions in the acclaimed SkaDate 9 solution significantly raised the interest in the subject. Well, good, because SEO plays a very important role in a highly competitive industry such as online dating.

In a gist, any SEO strategy has only one goal – to rank your site for competitive keywords better than the competition, thus driving target traffic back home. Let’s see how we can do that.

Obviously, the very first thing you are after are the right keywords. Those should reflect your site’s main direction (say, military singles), and at the same time tie in nicely with the general concept of the business, which in our case is online dating. Now juggle them up a bit and you can end up with a dozen top keywords best suited for your particular area.

After you find out what keywords will net you the biggest audience, it is time to take a long look at your dating site and choose best places to incorporate said keywords into. Don’t let any page go to waste. Everything works towards SEO – from content-heavy Homepage to scarcely filled Contacts, About, and anything in between.

But remember, your site should be both, user and search engine friendly. Thus your keywords should be seamlessly integrated into text content of every page. At the same time, a huge part of SEO success depends on meta data (like meta title and meta description). Never forget about those.

SkaDate 9 allows giving unique meta titles and descriptions to every single page, while also automatically generating meta data for any content added by website’s members.

This means, that adding blog posts or forum updates relevant to your keywords (read niche or target), will trigger an appropriate SEO response. Just keep consistently generating quality material on your topic and you’ll be fine in a few short months.

Still, there are a few things you can do with this very content to further improve your SEO. For instance, always build an interlinked Site Map for your site, which will simplify work for search robots. Don’t forget to add titles to links, and keyworded ALT descriptions to all of your images.

Use whole phrases instead of single keywords. Type them in bold while you are at it. But don’t go overboard, a couple of bold instances will be enough. In general, site’s navigation should be very easy – this will enormously help with link building. Use newsletters, link back generously, and don’t forget about fresh and unique content.

One more thing. It might be tempting to get every single tip in the book and pepper all of your texts with them. Don’t. Your webpage will be accessed by thousands of people, and they will immediately recognize a webcrawler magnet.

I bet you’ve encountered those sites yourself and never spent more than a couple of seconds there. Trust me, the humanity abandon this stuff faster than it did Lindsay Lohan. Google will keep an eye on you too. It will be a game-over if it notices you getting childishly over-exited or dirty with black-hat SEO. Just be clean and creative without excess.

See, most of this stuff is pretty straightforward and intuitive if you think about it long enough. Of course, there is a ton more info on the subject, but even basics will get you far. A lot of patience and determined experimenting with your SEO options can bring amazing results.

How do I know it really works? Well, look up ‘dating software’ in Google and see how high the SkaDate dating script ranks up there. That’s all the proof you need.