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- Contains trademark names (it might be withdrawn).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.

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