SEO (Search engine optimisation) and SEM (Search engine marketing) are important steps if you want to reach your audience.
This article is part of a guide that covers various techniques and methods to have in mind if you really want to develop your trafic.
This first article is aimed to give you a clear list of factors that will help you to obtain a better ranking in search engine results.
In addition to that, you will find some related tips and tricks for your dating site / blog. We hope you will find this resource useful.
SEO Check list
Note :
+ Favorable factor.
- Unfavorable factor.
Hosting
+ Geolocation : host your site in United States is you want to target US market (note : you may also rent a “tunel” from your country to an hosting company located in United States).
- Frequent interruptions of service.
- Slowness.
Domain name
+ Contains keywords in the topic of the site.
+ A generic top-level domain (com, net, org). Com for commercial, net for network and org for organisations - .org domains may be cool if you only target rankings (.ie : don”t really plan to work on the brand aspect of your activity) - even for dating sites -.
+ A domain targeted for a special country and language : .co.uk for a UK site and so on.
- A too long name.
- Contains trademark names (it might be withdrawn).
Topic of the site
+ Start your website with a well-defined and measurable goal. This advice also applies for a dating site. Choose your topic precisely. You may for exemple target senior dating or gay dating niches …
Site structure
+ Hierarchical organization : homepage > main topics. Topics > articles.
+ Name of subdirectories corresponding to the topic of the content.
+ Presence of a robots.txt file.
+ XML Sitemap linked from robots.txt.
+ Presence of an RSS feed.
- Using frames.
Organisation of a page
+ The name of the pages should contain the main keywords. Those keywords also must appear in the content of the page.
+ Use H1, H2, H3, etc. tags in order to organise the content of the pages.
+ Using CSS style sheets.
- Keyword stuffing your pages. Avoid repeating your keywords. Write for users, not for spiders.
- Too large-size page or file too heavy to load.
- Too many ads.
- No text in the page (images only).
- Invalid Html, body, head tags or other non closed or absent tags.
- Hidden text or hidden links in the code of the page.
The title tag
+ The title tag is mandatory.
+ The syntax is <title> text of your title </title>, and it occurs in head section of the HTML code of the page.
- Same text in the title on all pages.
- Text made of a series of keywords.
The meta tag description
+ The description meta tag is used for the description displayed in the main search engine results.
+ Size : less than 160 characters.
+ The format is
<meta name=”description” content=”Your description”>
- Description made of a series of keywords. Rather, it must contain true phrases including keywords.
Internal links
+ Absolute URLs.
+ The text used for links should contain the main targeted keywords.
+ Using nofollow when you link your affiliate landing dating pages for exemple.
- Dynamic / JavaScript links.
- Avoid 302 redirects.
Images
+ Presence of alt and title attributes that describe the image.
<img title=”" alt=”" >
External links
+ Links from respected sites in your area
+ Links on pages with a PageRank above 3.
+ Presence in the Dmoz directory.
+ Remove broken links. Use for exemple linktiger to detect broken links on your site. Wordpress also has special plugins for this.
- Backlinks only coming from directories.
- Using the same title and the same description in all your backlinks.
- Loss of backlinks.
- More than 100 links in a page.
