Website optimization for search engines is a complex set of measures meant to bring a website higher in search engine results pages based on certain search queries. Let’s start with signing up for webmaster tools and web analytics tools.

Webmaster Tools

Webmaster accounts at Google and Bing can bring you a lot of advantages. Webmaster tools help narrow the gap between webmasters and search engines and it is the only real channel of communication between you and these two search engine giants. This is the link for the Bing Webmaster Tools, and this one is for the Google Webmaster Tools.

Let’s take a closer look at the two services.

What you need to do is post your website info (including domain name), path to sitemap.xml file(s), robots.txt file settings.

You will be shown detailed information on how many pages are indexed by the search engine, how many external links point to your site, and if there are any issues with your site‟s availability.

In a special section, you will see the search queries and the position of your site which will allow you to track your progress in the site promotion. The details about duplicate or missing titles, safety issues and other important information will help you to avoid mistakes in search engine optimization.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the best tool to use if you want to analyze the behaviour of your site visitors and whether this or that promo campaign turned out to be as effective as you hoped it would.

This is what Google Analytics can give to a website owner:

• A simple way to analyze the site traffic (referrals, conversions, bounce rate, search queries by which people find your site).
• Analysis of visitors‟ activity on all pages of your website (average time on page, number of unique page views, click maps, most popular landing pages and exit pages).
• Analysis and comparison of different traffic sources, for example, contextual advertising, banners, mass mailings and social network campaigns.

To install Google Analytics on your website, you need to:

a) Register with the system.
b) Specify your site URL and get the tracking code.
c) Add this code to all pages of your website.

To make sure that your visitors’ statistics are accurate, do not forget to exclude your own visits from the stats by filtering out your IP address.

Keyword research

Using the right keywords is an all-important step in promoting your website. Now we would like to talk about the best strategy to approach the keyword research process.

• Define the search queries that describe your website. Compile a list of words that can serve as a relevant description of your business and can therefore attract people who are interested in what you offer. Brainstorm all the words that you think a potential customer would type in a search box. You can draw inspiration from your
  competitors‟ websites and search engine suggestions.

• Expand the list. Use keyword tools like the Google Keyword Planner to expand the list of your keywords and get an idea of their popularity. Make sure you get a good mix of shorter keywords (also called head terms) and long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific, which means that visitors who land on your website are more likely to be qualified; to better illustrate this concept, compare „online dating‟ and „free dating site in California.‟

• Prioritize your list. Choose the most important keywords that you will use on your dating site and get rid of the keywords that are not relevant. When going through keywords, consider their use frequency and competitive positions. Finally, you will have carved out the final list of keywords that you will put on your website.

• Identify preferred landing pages. Divide your keywords between the pages of your dating site. The general rule is: put keywords with the largest search volume onto the most important pages (main page, sign up page).

Helpful links:

. Google Trends will let you analyze its search trends.

. Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is a set of tips and advice from Google.

. Thesaurus.com will prove useful for finding synonyms and antonyms of your keywords.

. The following tools will help you research keywords that your competitors use: SEMRush and KeywordSpy.

SEO settings

Now that you have compiled a list of keywords and decided on the pages where to put them, it is time to do so and make sure that your site pages are properly indexed by the search engines.

Where do you start?

Set up a title and description for each page

Search engines use texts from Title and Description tags as a summary of what the page is about, so putting keywords into these tags is always helpful.

<title></title>

<meta name=’description’ content=”>

If possible, use the same keywords in headings (H1, H2, and H3). Search engines place great importance on these tags as well.

Set Open Graph tags

Open Graph is a protocol which enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. The protocol was originally created by Facebook. Open graph tags are responsible for the information (images, headings, description) that is shown in the news feed when people “Like” or “Share” content.

Avoid duplicate content

A lot of pages can be accessed by several URLs. The most common examples are:

http://www.your-dating-site.com (with www)

http://your-dating-site.com (without www)

http://www.your-dating-site.com/ (with slash)

http://www.your-dating-site.com (without slash)

http://www.your-dating-site.com/index.php

Search engines call it “duplicate content,” and it can be bad for your website rankings because, for one thing, identical entries are hidden from search results. So, make sure to redirect all duplicate pages to the preferred “canonical” URL. The www/without www option can be selected in Google Webmaster Tools, and the rest can be handled with the .htaccess file or by using a 301 redirect.

Close unnecessary pages and directories from indexing, such as:

. Thank you pages

. Tags pages, or pages with duplicate content

. Pages with private content

You can make these changes in the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /admin/

Disallow: /thank_you/

Disallow: /de/

Integrate the code given by Google Analytics or another analytics service into your site.

It will generate detailed statistics about your website traffic and the traffic sources and will help measure the performance of your marketing campaigns.

If you start your website with the Dating Pro script, all these options are already included in its free SEO module. This will help you to do all the necessary settings directly from the administration panel so you won‟tneed to code anything.

Dating site promotion

Now that you are done with the internal optimization of your website, it’s time to start the promotion.

Website promotion is meant to attract targeted visitors to your dating site – people who will be interested in the information or services that you provide. In this manual, we will try to describe the best possible methods of attracting

people to your dating site. Some of these methods are paid and some are free.

Links from authority websites

In every business, there are trusted entities. In online business, they are called authority websites.  An authority site is a very high quality website that is respected by knowledgeable people in the industry. It can be a popular magazine, a thematic blog, a local portal or a catalogue of thematic websites. The links from these highly-relevant, high-quality sites pointing to your site; this will help you with promotion. Try to be mentioned by these sites and get a back link: write an article, order an editor’s review on your website or register your site in their catalogue. Examples of thematic websites in the sphere of online dating:

Banners and links exchange

When you select an online resource to exchange links or banners with, consider websites that can offer goods or services that may be useful to your site members. For example, if your website is targeted at pet lovers, it makes sense to cooperate with companies that sell pet products. If your website is for travelers, you can partner with companies that offer travel accessories, or can help to plan trips, book a flight and a hotel. Flowers and lingerie items are, not surprisingly, among the most popular items on dating websites.

They may say that link building is dead, but the fact is it can still affect your rankings in Google as of 2019, either positively (if the link comes from a trusted source) or negatively (if your source is flagged as suspicious), over time.

Our recommendations:

. Do not exchange links with websites that are hosted for free and have no domain name of their own.

. Exchange links with sites that are related with your site by topic. Exchanging links with unrelated sites is ineffective and unpopular.

. Exchange links with caution. Unscrupulous webmasters often remove your links from their websites after a while. Check your backlinks regularly.

Unique articles

Your site members are people who need your support in finding a partner. Post helpful advice on how to prepare for the first date, top 10 date ideas, dating after divorce, restaurant protocol, and so on. You can publish these articles on your own dating website or request a guest post on popular websites (that are related by topic with your site).

How to post your articles on external websites:

. The best method is to contact authority websites in your niche. Authority sites publish trustworthy information and link to other trustworthy places on the web. Post your unique article there and refer to your dating website.

. Do guest posting. A  guest post is your article on a third-party website in exchange for a back link. It is a win-win situation for both of you: the website owner gets unique content and the article author (you) gets a link that points to his/her dating website.

. Become a regular commenter on popular blogs in your niche.

. Publish your articles in the niche and local magazines. Do some research and locate the right editor for your dating site. Approach him or her by email or in Twitter, present an article or a pitch, and then follow up with a phone call a few days later. Visiting conferences may also help strike up an acquaintance.

Social media

Social networks are a great way to advertise your brand and communicate with your customers. Social networks can help attract a large number of visitors. They also offer extended audience parameters for better targeting.

Create a group or a page in Facebook, sign up for Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram and start sharing your news. The above networks can become a good traffic source for your dating site.

Commercial advertising (paid targeting advertising) in social networks is also available. You can create different ads for men and women, for different age groups, announce your contests and important events, and do many other things.

Our recommendations:

. Establish relationships, do not just post ads. Communicate with your followers and participate in two-sided conversations.

. Make sure that the decoration of your group or page looks appealing. Use corporate colour schemes and logotypes; upload a stylish header image. Conversion rates are much higher on branded pages.

. Use keywords in the name of your group or page.

. Give your followers an opportunity to share your content easily.

. Post regularly. You can decide to do it every six hours, or twice a week – it is important that people see a pattern and start anticipating your posts. This article gives some useful tips about how often to post in social media.

. Use hashtags (#) in your messages, even if you are not on Twitter.

. To save time, use quick posting services like HootSuite.com or FriendsPlus.me. Just try to make your messages unique across different platforms and don‟t forget to reply to comments.

Where else to post your content

The more you write about your dating site, the larger audience you are going to attract.

. Join social communities, leave your comments to different blog posts, guest post in the blogs with related topics and so on. Even a simple advertisement might be a good source of links and visitors.

. A lot of blog platforms have organized a great number of different communities. The most popular platforms include Blogger.com, Twitter, and Instagram.

. Some of the thematic forums allow you to create a signature with a link to your website.

Do not forget to use keywords and links to your site, or links with keywords in your promotional texts:

Search engines use this text to help determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. Include call-to-action in your messages:

. Sign up today

. Buy now

. Compare prices here

. Subscribe today

Use the URL Builder tool from Google to differentiate your links and track the effectiveness of various promo materials. For example, you can check the effectiveness of the links from different social networks. The idea is that you can input the following marks to your URLs:

. Campaign Source (e.g., google.com, newsletter, Pinterest)

. Campaign Medium (e.g., CPC, email, advertorial, affiliate)

. Campaign Term (e.g., a keyword in a search-campaign; optional)

. Campaign Content (e.g., BannerA, guestpost1, unsubscribe; optional)

. Campaign Name (e.g., coupon1, ProductLaunch, HR)

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