Dating Site Blog & SEO

On the subject of Munich dating, it has been noted that Munich is the singles capital of Germany, so why would there be any need for a dating site devoted to the people of Munich.  The truth is that dating in germany is not a concept that makes much sense to those outside the English-speaking world.  A date is such a foreign idea here.  The reason is that people in Germany develop relationships and don’t aim for a ‘date’ - i.e. an evening spent with the intention of developing a relationship.  I can see where the concept of a date does indeed sound a little silly.

However, there are a lot of foreigners in Munich and dating is normal for them.  Consequently there is a difference in expectation between what they want and what they get.  To clarify and clear up any cultural misunderstandings perhaps both parties shoudl make the effort to make it work.  English-speakers should try to make friendships first before delving into something deeper, whereas Germans could try and embrace slightly the concept of a date.

Munich speed-dating could be a very big flop here.  On the other hand, it could be just what the ex-pat population need.   Post comments here if you feel there is a need for speed-dating in Munich.

The new dating site layout is ready to be published online.  A few modifications are still required, but largely everything is ready and should be visible soon enough.

A lot of work still needs to be performed on the SEO side of things, as well as a few smaller bits of technical design.  Hopefully in a few weeks traffic to the site will start growing once the new-improved SEO-friendly design has been rolled-out.  This blog still plays an important part in keeping Google visiting the site, despite the constant ‘in development’ status of it, so I will keep posting to it until the site starts growing in strength.

Without goals in life, we are liable to underachieve. The same applies to relationships, in that it is healthy to have something for a couple to aim for. The crucial factor is whether or not each partner has their own personal goals as well as generic relationship goals.

People in relationships need to be dependent (to a healthy degree) on their partner - this promotes closeness and strengthens the relationship. The human desire to be needed and useful to other people is a very important aspect of our social interactions and extremely important for couples. However, we also need to not place too much strain on our partner by being too needy. Remember, strength is attractive and energy-giving; if you lack strength you can damage the relationship by tiring out your partner and depending on him/her too much, which they may come to resent (I am not referring to dependency caused by disability, which is entirely different). Hence, why it is healthy to have personal goals in life. Of course both partners need to work together for their relationship goals, i.e. to achieve increased trust, understanding, save for that elusive perfect home, etc. In addition, to keep the relationship healthy and vibrant, give yourself personal goals. Things such as increasing your standard of education, combating irrational fears, taking up a hobby, etc all contribute to your own strength and self-esteem. These factors can increase the total energy in a relationship and both partners will benefit. Additionally, once your partner sees you improving yourself, he/she may be motivated to improve themselves also, which will have a doubly positive impact.

Self-improvement, via the goal-orientated approach, should keep you enthusiastic and breath new life into your daily routine. This increase in energy and strength is very attractive and will keep a relationship on the right track. Many failed relationships derail due to personal problems and are not always directly attributable to the actual relationship per se. Improve yourself, achieve your goals, keep your mind young and energetic and then watch as your relationship reinvigorates itself. Like in many aspects of life, the key to succeeding in something is to first inwardly critically analyse yourself and then set goals for self-improvement.

The problem with online dating is that you need to be sure that what you are after is provided by the site you are using.  There are many sites which serve a niche market and you do not wish to inadvertently end up there if it is not your intention.  For instance, trying to find a soul-mate partner on a sexual submission site might not work to your advantage.

On the same note, make sure that what you are after does not cause offence to the majority of users on a site.  If PVC and whips are your thing, then think again about joining the various Christian dating sites… they might not be too happy when you contact them looking for willing dungeon dwellers.

There are many sites out there for many different tastes in relationship and interests.  If you need a specialist site, then find one.  On a more general level, most people in the Western world wish to just meet someone for a few dates to see what develops.  If you are hungry for children and desperately want marriage, then perhaps this could also be deemed a specialist interest and you would be better suited to joining a marriage agency.  As a hint for women, if you appear too desperate to get married, men sense something is wrong and start to run… and rightly so.  Go for the relationship first and if you are well suited, then marriage would normally follow… try it the other way round and people in the Western world will doubt your sincerity to your new found partner.

Click in Love is both an introduction agency and a dating website.  We aim to facilitate the dating/meeting process for genuine people in search of love.  We believe in love, romance and all things that come with a dedicated genuine relationship.  People who use our site do so with the intention of forming relationships; not business relationships (such as what many intercultural marriages appear to be, where the man gets someone to have sex with, who irons his shirt and cooks for him, whilst the woman gets money, stability, visa and a family all based in a rich Western country).  At Click in Love, we deal with intercultural relationships where both partners want more than the basics.  If you feel you want something like this, then this site is for you.  If you are after something different (and there is nothing wrong with that) then I ask you to respectively remember that this site is for people looking for love and romance, so perhaps you are better suited choosing a more fitting site for your requirements.

So many dating sites appear to have messed up the single most important factor in retaining customer loyalty and driving increased site usage; i.e. the users’ photo album.  The importance in providing good, clear, easily accessible images to people browsing a dating site is well documented.  However, what are the main criteria for a good photo browsing experience?

First, we need to define the website limitations.  The administrator of a dating site can not realistically demand that all users submit professionally-taken photos; therefore the aesthetics of the image itself are not taken into consideration.  Then we are left with what the site designer can actually be responsible for:

• provide large images (a generous reciprocal crop factor should be supported)
• well-proportioned images (no vertical/horizontal skewing should occur during post-upload processing)
• quick load of each and every image after a user-triggered event
• easy navigation between images
• main image must be bigger than the thumbnail
• main image must not extend over the average page dimensions
• if possible, allow user to upload photo description for every image

Most sites flaunt at least one of these rules and a ridiculously high percentage only have one or two of the rules implemented.  I have seen some sites where the thumbnail image is actually the same size as the main image (if it is too small the photo is hard to see; if it is too large it takes too long to download).

I think the best solution is to utilise average size thumbnails, with the corresponding main image at least 4-6 times the dimensions of the thumbnail.  With the pervasive adoption of Javascript, there is no excuse not to allow users to view the images via a rollover function, and all on the same page.  In addition, there should be no need to navigate to a different page or a pop-up window to view the clicked-on image.  Follow these straightforward rules and the user will have a far more convenient browsing experience and usability frustration need not drive them away.

What is the single most critical factor for dating sites in determining their success?  I guess there are many critical factors but one which strikes me as of the utmost importance is the ease of accessing photos and the quality of those photos.  For example, many sites insist on opening up photos in a new browser window, which can be inconvenient and time consuming.  In addition, the images are often either too large or too small… you would nearly think the site designer was unable to automatically resize an image.  On top of all this, you have the problem of poor navigation and control of images.  Ideally, a profile should have thumbnails loaded of all available images.  This keeps the data download small and allows the page to load fast.  A simple click or mouse rollover should allow a larger image to be seen, but within the same window.  Click in Love has as it’s cornerstone, middle-sized, clear images, viewable immediately after upload and easily accessible.  We believe that this design feature will prove most attractive to dating site users and offer a level of quality that is not matched online today.

Once the trend in online dating seemed to be to target Eastern European women looking to ‘escape’ to the West.  Though this trend still exists in many ways, as the EU expands and former soviet countries gain new wealth through the exploitation of energy sources, those countries where (traditionally) women migrated from, are finding economic ways to retain their citizens.  The result is that the abundant supply of beautiful, well-educated women seeking to better themselves abroad in Western Europe is drying up considerably.  I personally think this is a good thing for the women and hope that soon some sort of balance will exist between European East and West.  However, for a dating site specialising in intercultural relationships, this could be the death knoll.  By staying ahead of the market in terms of site features and better customer care, Click in Love hopes to facilitate the spreading of culture awareness across the EU and beyond, thus enabling partner searching to be that much more than a sleazy case of exploitation of vulnerable women.

Today there appears to have been a mid-month Google update which has drastically improved the exposure of Click in Love in the SERP’s. Keywords for online dating sites are competitive and difficult to rank well in. However, I wonder is it worth gathering traffic via other means. For instance, if I write on this blog about engineering topics, it should attract engineers… which in turn may see that it is a dating site and decide to browse and see what is on offer. Today I noticed that my site for the last few weeks has been doing just that… i.e. by targeting various keywords, I am ranking well and getting traffic I would not normally have obtained for a dating site (thanks to Google’s recent minor update). The question is, will this traffic convert to useful leads? Only time will tell.
Will

How does a woman make a perfect photo for her dating profile? Well, ‘perfect’ is a subjective term and will vary depending on what image you are trying to convey. Often this image is determined as much by what you think others wish to see, as what you wish to portray yourself. After all, you are trying to show yourself in a light in which men will take notice. For instance, on some dating sites there seems to be quite a few photos on the front pages of scantily-clad women, often in poses intended to emphasise their body shape and suggest their sexual desirability. What type of image does this give to the men browsing? For many men, body shape is important, but women should not assume that is all they want. I will stick my neck out a little here and guess that once in a relationship, not many men want their partner posing in a sexually suggestive manner for all the world to see. In fact, many men would disrespect a woman who did that. If you are after a one-night stand, then feel free to pose like this. If you are after a long-term relationship, then maybe opting for a more modest image might help net the type of man you want.

Ideally, the ‘perfect’ image, is one in which you come across as being ‘balanced’. By this I mean, neutral, professional, warm of heart, etc. Sexually suggestive photos will lead to the wrong type of man showing an interest. Cover up. Wear beautiful clothes of course, but wear them in a way which does not suggest you are auditioning for a centrefold position. If you wish to show how physically attractive you are, then be inventive… posing in a bikini comes across as cheap and desperate. Show a man you have more than just a body to offer… do this and men who want more than just a body will start showing an interest in you. Women make the mistake by assuming that all men are basically animalistic and judge women on their shape; that is wrong. Initially, they are attracted by this, but it quickly vanishes. Despite what women think, men want more than just looks and your profile photo should somehow support this.

Instead of the bikini pose, why not opt for a sporting photo instead (assuming you wish to show your body, then do so in a less sleazy way). Better still, if you have a nice smile, don’t detract from it by wearing nearly no clothes… instead, get a closeup photo of your face, taken with a large aperture setting (this blurs the background and gives emphasis to your face in the photo). If using makeup, it should be subtle and not overpowering. Less is best.

Avoid photos which fail to show your face clearly. The face is the single most critical part of your photo to display information about yourself. Smiling is not always a necessity as a neutral expression can also say a lot. Obviously, frowning or negative facial expressions should be avoided.

To summarise, try to place your character in the photograph. Leave out the sexually suggestive poses; it impresses only the easily-impressed and you will attract only short-term interest from a man. Of course, if you feel that sex is the main gift you bring to the table, then by all means do as you wish to attract a man who wants a woman like this. There are many different types of relationship and I am giving an opinion on the types of relationship which lead to marriage and children… not a relationship based on lust and a disregard for what each partner has other than shallow attributes. Humans are incredibly complex and to sell yourself as a body, would (for most women) be selling yourself short.

If you need photography tips on how to take a good portrait image, then let me know and I can forward you some good resources.

One of the more successful website phenomena of recent years is the rise of social networking sites. For the traditional dating site, there is a potential threat in this rise. For example, a large subset of the online dating community also subscribe to these networking sites and the possibility to make new friends has increased dramatically for them… why should they bother with a dedicated dating site. The likes of Facebook and Google’s new API allow developers to create applications which social networking site users can install and access from their profile. One hot area for developers is to tie in their application with a dating site’s database. Many of the more traditional dating sites are failing to take advantage of this opportunity. Facebook alone has many 10’s of millions of subscribers, so by creating an application for this medium it is possible to increase your slice of the potential new dating market segment.

As the owner of a dating site, I need to look at ways to increase ClickInLove’s exposure online. Utilising the massive user base of the likes of Facebook and MySpace, offers small site owners like me, a chance to reach a target audience that would otherwise probably elude me. All it requires is a little programming savvy, the will and time to write a Facebook application and the viral methodology to get the application subscribed to by interested users. Eventually the big sites will squash all competition in social networking, but until then, there is always a chance this ploy will succeed.

Munich is a very multicultural and ethnically diverse city.  The student population alone reaches 100,000, yet the total population is only about 1.3 million.  For a city of this size, the transport network is second to none and boasts an underground system (U-Bahn), trams, surface trains as well as a fast intra-city train system (S-Bahn) and of course the ubiquitous buses and taxis which every city has.  Add the English Garden (the biggest inner-city park in Europe), a multitude of galleries, museums, restaurants, bars, cafes, shopping areas and an enthusiastic lively attitude by the Munich City Council (which organises free street festivals, concerts and the like) and you end up with an excellent place to live.

Throw in the high quality of life here and low crime with the affluent status Munich enjoys and the only thing left to make it a dating mecca are the single people.  Luckily, Munich is the singles captial of Germany.  What more could you ask for.

With that in mind, ClickInLove shall organise various dating events throughout the year.  Things like Speed Dating, excursions (both city and county-wide), relaxed social evenings, etc.  In such a lively, vibrant city with such a fluid, diverse population, it should make dating that much more enjoyable and accessible for all those interested.

I noticed a visitor to ClickInLove today actually found the site by typing into Google the search phrase “Why is Speed Dating Morally Wrong”.  Despite the fact that ClickInlove does not have content which states this view (so the Google user reached the wrong page for his/her query), it does in fact raise a valid point; do people think speed dating is immoral?

From the perspective of someone looking at the world in rose-tinted glasses, I can see where they are coming from.  Ideally, dating should involve a process of getting to know someone before making a decision on whether or not they think a relationship is possible with the partner in question.  This takes time for most people.  However, in reality, this is a cumbersome and ill-fitting model to find your perfect match.  Speed dating, in my opinion, offers users a change to discard from the process, those people they consider incompatible with themselves, at an early stage in the dating game.  Of course, you need to be a fantastic judge of character to get it right and most people will reject potential partners based on shallow criteria.  However, considering that most of us are capable of making snap decisions which stand a chance of being right, maybe speed dating is not as immoral as it sounds.  We know what we feel after all and a few minutes chat with someone is enough to let us know what our initial gut instinct is.  Are we rejecting those other people on shallow criteria?  Perhaps, but with the right attitude, nobody need feel rejected.  In the long run, it allows people to choose their partners without the often painful and embarassing process of traditional dating.

So, do I think speed dating is immoral?  Not at all.  I think it is an efficient way to maximise your chances of meeting your ideal partner, whilst at the same time allowing everyone to do so in a relaxed and pleasant environment.  That is not to say traditional dating is out, but speed dating should be seen as something which compliments it, as opposed to contradicting it.

I am down to the last few things which need to be completed for prior to the dating site going live. I have created a ‘to do’ list of prioritised actions. I expect to make a lot of progress on this list this week and hopefully will give the green light to Click in love members to upload their photos. Then I can start advertising for men to sign up.

With regards to the terrible bugs I have experienced recently, I think I can now say that most of the CSS issues are resolved. The issue from yesterday, regarding the text alignment in Firefox, was fixed just 30 mins ago (11pm)! There is only one major CSS issue left that I must tackle. This is a nasty one I fear, but after having tackled the issues of the last few days, I am optimistic I can find a solution (false bravado here). This is an IE issue with the ClickInLove member profile page. Using a mixture of PHP, Javascript and amble lashings of <div> tags, I have created a profile page (with photos displayed nicely) which is worthy of closer inspection (if you are into coding). On the plus side this is a complex piece of code using PHP to generate Javascript with MySQL-retrieved data. On the negative side, it is a complex piece of code and if anything goes wrong it takes a hefty amount of effort and concentration to fix it. For Firefox I believe I have ironed out all the issues. However, with IE I am faced with a very intimidating array of layout issues. IE has made a mess of implementing CSS and on the profile page MS’s failed efforts becomes fairly obvious! This is my next mammoth task, to get the profile page (photo section) working in IE. I think I will need to spend the last day of my holidays working on this. Mind you, if I can fix this problem in a day, I will be happy.

On a more positive note, the initial pages for the German and Russian pages were placed online today and even SEO-optimised to a degree. It has been quite a productive day, which is a far cry from the last few days. Actually that is not true… most days this week were productive, but only today was noticeable progress made.  The launch date for the site is drawing closer.
Will

Today’s goal is to find a couple of affiliate partners for the front page. For the layperson, this means that I will place a few well-chosen adverts on the dating site. By doing this I become an ‘affiliate’ advertiser for these sites and they pay me a small amount for every lead I pass their way. By ‘lead’ I am referring to every visitor to my site who clicks the adverts and registers on the other site. Of course this is a risky strategy as I am directing my potential members to a competitor… however I need to pay for this site in some way.

So, here I am with 50 different things to do on the site and a complete absence of any form of project management technique. A relatively long time ago I created a preliminary Gantt Chart with which to plan my time and work effort, but alas that document succeded in hiding amongst my other clutter on the PC. I think it is time to resurrect it and regain some level of control over my workload. Too much to do and not enough time to do it. I need a PA… all interested in this position should post me their CV asap!!!!

Since the new look dating site ‘Click in Love‘ was uploaded last week, there has been a serious drop in the number of people registering. This is a problem. I need to analyse where the visitors are exiting and determine what element of the site is failing to draw them in. On top of this issue, I also need to apply the new layout uniformly across the entire site. As it now stands there is still a lot to do.
Will

I decided today to try and place an entry in Wikipedia for ClickInLove.  I found out through trial and error that first I wil need to build up some reputable links and articles about the site.  Still, this is something that I will do and hopefully have an entry in Wikipedia soon enough.

Due to recent situations, the ClickinLove Blog had been temporarily suspended.  Whilst these circumstances are unique, it is fair to say that things are still a bit shaky and regular postings to the blog may be infrequent for a while yet.  Nevertheless, it is my hope that things will return to normal soon.  Interestingly, despite the relative period of zero time investment in the dating site, it still is managing to grow of its own accord.  I think on Google, once a site reaches a critical point in terms of exposure, the link building gradually starts working under its own steam and the link stats grow by themselves… not so much an exponential, out-of control growth, but more a linear, arithmetic progression.  Of course this has a ceiling, but if the site reaches that point, I doubt I will be counting links too much as the site will have become a runaway success.

Having a blog is a useful tool in the SEO campaign, but using it to generate content is not enough for a site’s needs.  It is critically important, in order to reach the full effect of your blog, to regularly update it.  I use the term ‘regularly’ with a lot of emphasis here.  It is not good enough to update it once or twice a week, you really need to be adding new content at least 4 or 5 times a week; more if possible.

The benefits of this can be seen by closely monitoring the time it takes for Google to index your blog entry.  After a certain length of time of consistent daily updates, you will notice that Google will gradually increase the rate of indexing your site’s content.  Just look on the search results to find your blog entry and it will tell you when that entry was included into Google’s index.  Be sure to regularly update your sitemap to make sure that all your pages are included.  I have found from personal experience that if you use a sitemap for long enough, then one day you leave out a certain page (like the main blog front page), then Google may actually de-index that page.  For me it took a couple of weeks before I realised I had omitted the page from my sitemap.  However, once I realised what had happened, I was able to put it back in and Google grabbed it again within days.  So be careful with your sitemaps, they may have more impact that you are lead to believe.

With that said, daily updates to your blog will benefit your site’s rankings enormously and allow Google to both crawl faster and perhaps even give you extra points in the ranking algorithm.  I know it is a pain to be creative every day with your blog, but it is probably well worth persevering for 6 months with this strategy and seeing if it pays off.

What does PHP stand for and what does it do?

PHP is a recursive definition, much like GNU (GNU Not Unix), and is an acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”. This is engineering humour and mirrors the recursive nature of some of the standard programming constructs that any programmer will be familiar with. It follows closely the syntax of the C programming language and is not dissimilar to Javascript syntax (though still very different in both usage and design). PHP is a ‘server-side scripting language‘ - what this means is that you write a script (a small program-like piece of code) which is parsed (read and acted upon) by the PHP interpretor (a program installed on your server which knows how to read your script and analyse it). The results of the interaction between the interpretor and your script usually result in some form of output, either data directed into a database or some text converted into HTML for display purposes.
If that all sounds a little confusing, then think of it like this: PHP is a program used to serve up the content you tell it and pass this to the users’ browsers. So, PHP runs and executes your script (which you have stored on a page) before that page is sent across the Internet to the end user’s browser (e.g. Firefox or Internet Explorer). The script runs on the server; this is the place (it is actually a dedicated computer) where your web site is hosted, i.e. saved and stored for people to read from. Compare this to Javascript, which is a language which does not run on the server but instead runs on the user’s computer (which is called a client). Scripts written in Javascript are referred to as ‘client-side scripts’.
Why would you want something like PHP on your site. Well HTML is static and does not change. You cannot create a web page displaying the date and time using HTML alone, you need to get this ‘real-time’ data from the server hosting your site - and this is where a server-side scripting language comes in. There are many such languages, but PHP remains the most common and is a very neat and flexible way to add content (usually text, but images and other things also) to your pages. Going back to the example, if you wish to display today’s date on your page, you can write a PHP script and within it call the ‘Date()’ function. This will command the PHP interpretor to request the current date from the server and to display it on your page. This is a very simple example of PHP usage. However, used in conjunction with MySQL (a language to save data in databases), then PHP becomes very powerful indeed. See PHP and MySQL for more information on these languages.

When it first gained popularity, Speed dating sounded like a shallow fad which would soon disappear.  However, that was definitely not the case.  Many years later and it is still going strong across the world with many varied spin-offs doing the rounds as well.  Why the popularity?

One reason is that it gives participants the chance to judge their chemistry with a potential date, without really having to ‘endure’ that date.  3 mins is the average time to chat to the person seated opposite you, which is more than enough time for a mature person to determine if they actually want to see that person again… yet not so long that their endurance is tested to the limit.  Going on dates and choosing a partner for a date is all about risk management; trying to get the best match with what you have got to offer.  Traditionally this leads to some completely wasted evenings and many memories you would rather forget.  With Speed dating you can try the goods before you agree to buy them (essentially, without the dodgy undertones).

One drawback of speed dating, is that many people are poor judges of character.  It takes time to get to know the real person behind the clothes and without the flashy watch or low-cut top. Many people can not judge the ‘quality’  of a person within 3 mins.  They might quickly decide if they ‘like’ that person or not (with the term ‘like’ meaning a gut-feeling without a real comprehension of anything other than shallow attributes by which to judge).  Consequently, they will choose the good-looking people sitting opposite them, or the wealthy-looking or whatever else they judge to be an indicator of a good partner.  With a normal evening-long date, they might not like their partner at the start, but change their mind as the evening progresses and the shyness turns to warmth.  Speed dating misses this and there is the risk that you could miss a good potential partner.

Nevertheless, I think it is a good concept and one which is worth trying.  With that in mind I intend to run Munich speed dating events in 2008.  Hopefully I will be able to report back here with some statistics of the success of these events.  So check back here regularly to see if the Click in Love Munich Speed Dating Evenings are organsied and running.

One of the most awkward things to deal with as an SEO practitioner is the expectations of customers.  It is often hard to convince them that SEO takes a long time to fully work and campaign results will not be obvious for many months.  Sometimes it can take over a year for really competitive terms and there is never a guarantee that any site will rank number 1 in Google for their chosen keywords.  Customers however, are sceptical of paying for something they might not actually see the results of for quite a while (and they are right to think in this way).  Many SEO ’specialists’ do seem to produce little for what they are paid and they hide under the fact that it does indeed take time to rank well.  In addition, when choosing an SEO company, make sure they have not inadvertently done damage to previous customers’ listings in the Google index.  It is not the first time that an SEO campaign involved the use of black-hat techniques which lead to the de-listing of the SEO company AND their clients.

So, if an SEO company promises quick results, think carefully about whether or not you can trust them.  I tell my clients it takes roughly 6-9 months before they can expect to see results and even then I am approximating.  Quietly, I hope to get them good results a lot sooner, but I do not mention that in case I fall short of their expectations for reasons beyond my control.  Despite this, for some sites I have SEO-managed, the campaign generated top placements very quickly.  Even this blog usually jumps to the first page of Google for competitive keywords within an hour or two of publication of an entry, so it is possible to do a great SEO campaign and get good results quickly, but just beware of a company which guarantees this.  Nobody can guarantee a placement in the Google index, never mind a top spot there.

Have you noticed how many different dating sites exist online today?  How can so many survive when they are in fact in direct competition with each other.  Well there are four main factors to explain this apparently contradictory situation:

1. Not all are in direct competition with each other and happily manage to exist in niche markets
2. Many of these sites share a common database and form an affiliate network, so there are less unique sites than you think
3. Most sites are not successful and eventually disappear once they realise they cannot compete
4. Dating site users do not appear to have much loyalty to any one brand and often are members on more than one site

Niche markets are the big area of potential, so if you wish to ride the current wave of growth, find yourself a less-competitive population subset and market your site accordingly.  Just make sure that you are knowledgeable about your market and are not some cowboy after a quick profit who would try anything to get his site off the ground… eventually your customers will feel your lack of expertise and choose your competitor.  Do your research and understand your customers’ needs.

Be wary of joining an affiliate network of dating sites.  Just one big database and hundreds of sites plugged into it… dating site users do not like this.  Often they find themselves getting unsolicited emails from other sites affiliated with yours.  Gives the impression you have sold their details onto a third party.  In addition, you are not totally in control and the profit does not all belong to you.

One last point to note; dating site users do use other sites as well.  Bear this in mind when you are thinking of ways to keep customer loyalty.  You will need to offer an enticing USP to keep them with you for any length of time.

One of the risks of online dating is that you never really know who you are contacting.  Normally this is not really an issue as long as you follow sensible guidelines and keep safety foremost in your mind.  Many people are too trusting and in their haste to find love leave themselves vulnerable to various scams and risks.  Of course, most people on a dating site are of the decent honest variety, but still it pays to be careful at the start of any relationship.

It is not only women who should heed this advice, but men also.  It seems gullible men make easy prey for the tabloids, so it is not hard to find examples of middle-aged men around the world landing themselves in all sorts of trouble in the pursuit of love through online channels.  For example, there was an English man who twice sent large sums of money abroad to online contacts he met through a dating site, only to turn up at the Heathrow Airport for the women (at different times in his life) not to show up.  Conned twice by fraudsters.  An Australian man even went to West Africa to meet his new partner, only to be kidnapped and held hostage with a ransom made to his family.  These are extreme situations, but nevertheless highlight the need for caution.

If these examples do not open your eyes, then take heed of this BBC news story which does not go into specific details, but highlights the risks gullible men take for love.  It is well known that women should be careful about meeting strangers for the first time, but men also need to be wary, especially those that find they are trusting.  As a rule of thumb, if money is ever asked for, then report the request to the dating site involved and ask them to investigate the validity of the person asking for money.  Often the site will have mechanisms in place to uncover these fraudsters and will welcome your advance warning prior to you following a path in which you may be scammed.  Once tricked out of money, many men feel embarrassed and foolish that they were so naive and consequently fail to report the crime.  This might be understandable to a degree to the average proud man, but it is morally wrong and leaves the floodgates open for the criminal (or criminal gangs) to strike again.

So be wary when meeting your partner for the first time and never send money to someone you have just met.  If you do plan to meet them in their own country, then (assuming you met them through ‘Click in Love’) let us know and we can put security measures in place to protect you and help ensure the person you are meeting is genuine.  Do not feel afraid to contact us and ask for advice beforehand.

With that in mind, remember that the dating scene is mostly composed of real, normal, decent people looking for happiness and romance; so don’t let a few rare cases ruin your enjoyment - just take sensible precautions and think before you act.

‘Web 2′ is due to make an appearance and ‘take the net by storm’, apparently. One of the many facets of Web 2 is what is called Social Bookmarking. These are sites centred around user-generated content that includes individuals placing their favourite links online for all to see. It is a good way to get inbound links, though the value of these links may not amount to a great deal.  The real benefit is in the knock-on effect of social bookmarking.  Not only does Google index your bookmarks (and provide you with links) but sites like Digg and others allow a rating system to operate whereby users can score your articles/content.  The more people read it, the higher your page will rise (on the social bookmarking/rating site) and the weighting of the backlink also rises.  Soon you end up with a decent link to your site, plus all the traffic that will come from having risen in the rankings.

A tricky subject and one which deserves a lot of attention is link bait.  What sort of link bait would work on a dating site (or any site for that matter)?  Ideally we would want something which would appeal both to the users of the site and webmasters looking for something hot to link to.  As you may already know, link bait can take many different forms, but the best must surely be pure, unique content that people naturally just want to devour.  Is it possible for a dating site to create such content?  I think so, but a careful recipe is required.  Be prepared for some programming and data capture, add a dash or two of appealing SEO-friendly CSS design, sprinkle a little statistical analysis on top, leave to simmer for a couple of months and then serve to your target audience.  Following me?

Let us look at it in more detail.  You want unique content that plays to your site’s strengths.  Throw yourself together a forum and get the site’s members to contribute.  Be careful here as many users may use a forum to bypass any flow control of information between members which you may have put in place.  In the forum put up a number of polls with enticing questions.  Make the poll interesting and plan it with a view to gathering some useful stats.  Effectively you are running a statistical experiment from a cross-sectional sample of the dating community in your particular dating niche.  Leave the poll running for a few months to collate a statistically viable sample set.  Once your data has been harvested, throw it together into a package such as Excel and make use of some of the advanced statistical techniques they have made available to you.  Most people would struggle with analysing raw data, but there are online resources which can help you perform a feasible data capture and analysis project.  Ok, most people would not know where to start, so drop me a line if you get stuck.

Use excel to present the findings of your study in a nice professional manner, with tables charts etc.  On your web page Include a disclaimer and highlight the sample size, which techniques you employed to analyse the data and other such useful facts about your study.  Wrap it all up in a nice easy to read ‘Web 2′ format and allow people to link to it.

What you now have is a unique statistical report (though potentially of dubious scientific validity, depending on how you ran the experiment) , which will provide useful stats to both webmasters and site visitors alike.  People like reading lists and facts, so offer this up to them.  It will be interesting to read and offers an additional benefit in that the results are unique and freshly created from your own site.  Give it a try, include it as part of a site feed and distribute it tothe feed aggreagators.  You may also wish to do a press release and gain extra exposure that way.  Don’t just leave your link bait to grow old on your site… get in indexed and manually linked to until it reaches critical mass and the links start generating all by themselves.

Good luck and let me know how you get on; I will allow some of you who follow this advice the chance to write a small article about your project and publish it here (another link to add to your site’s tally).

AJAX is a useful cornerstone of ‘Web 2′. As part of my effort to streamline administration of the dating site, I have placed a utilities management page online (password protected of course). With this I use AJAX scripting to populate forms with content extracted from purpose-specific databases.  This in turn allows me to generate ‘feeds on the fly’.

What is the purpose of this?  Well, by having a web utility which can run whichever scripts I choose to execute, I am able to mix and match the content of my databases and generate truly unique feeds.  These feeds are in turn picked up by the aggregators, or already have been picked up previously and contain links back to my fresh content.  The difference with normal feeds is that this content is truly customisable across my entire site… not just limited to my blog or forum.  I can vary the feeds whenever I like to get backlinks to every page on my site. This helps maintain an even spread of backlinks (and indirectly PR) across the whole site.  If you are an SEO practitioner and eager to adopt new strategies, then think about what I have written and try to vary your feeds on a daily basis to allow all your site’s content to absorb those links.  Of course, be careful not to dilute your PR too much and never away from the more critical areas on your site.

The issue of website security is an important one and worth learning a bit about. Hacking is an often misinterpreted phrase which many people use to describe illegally accessing and/or modifying restricted network content. This in fact is called Cracking.

Cracking is something every webmaster needs to be aware of, especially if you have a database on your site.  If that database houses private information belonging to you or your clients, then the stakes are raised considerably.  Things such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting and other such security risks are a very real threat to the integrity and security of your data.  If this data falls into the wrong hands then the webmaster could be held liable for any adverse consequences which result from failing to protect that data, especially if it is sensitive information belonging to your clients which may include personally identifiable data such as bank details, credit history etc.

Many webmasters feel the risk is minimal.  After all, who will target my site - I am a small player and not likely to experience a concerted attack on my web site.  Think again.  Scripts make use of things like ICMP to probe your site.  These scripts are pervasive, indiscriminate and executing right now, scouring the net for sites with vulnerabilites with which to exploit.  If they ping your site and get an interesting response, then the spammer/cracker might just decide to investigate further - are you prepared for their attention?  Have you turned off your error reporting?  Are you sure your directories are not being displayed when an error is encountered (and these errors which expose your directory structure are easy to create).  In other words, if you are not actively learning about website security, then you are at risk of attack as you are unprepared to protect your site.  Knowledge is power… read up on the subject of website security and make the small steps necessary to safeguard your site.  It is not as difficult as it might sound and may save you from the potential nightmare scenario of having your database compromised.

I have started to create what I call an SEO Sitemap. It is a cross between a roadmap and a sitemap for the site’s SEO campaign. This document will be a clickable sitemap with links to information on every page on the site. This information will take the form of page keywords/phrases, keyword density, total number of words per page, number of outbound/inbound links, detailed list of on-page parameters and other such statistic-rich areas of SEO interest.  many standalone applications already exist for this purpose, but I find it does not hurt to create your own version.

Do not confuse this with a normal webmaster Sitemap, of the type used by Google and Yahoo (to name a few) to help index a site.  My idea is purely as an SEO management tool to help organise and coordinate an SEO campaign.

I created a Google Reader account and subscribed the ClickInLove blog to it, just to see if the site feeds work ok. The results seem fine, in that Google Reader picks up the feeds ok. A Windows XP-based reader I downloaded did not work however. I need to investigate this further.

What is all the fuss about RSS? Many people do not even know what it is, so how important can it actually be. Well, from an SEO perspective is it a useful tool to get your content indexed/linked to on other sites. Will anyone ever actually read it? Perhaps, but at the very least your site will have deep links to multiple pages, which is never a bad thing.

Not all SEO techniques are good - not all are bad; somewhere in between lies grey-hat techniques.  These are those tried and tested ‘tricks’ which are not not altogether unethical, but which are definitely open to abuse and nearly invariably are abused.

Let us talk about Blogs and the SEO angle.  It is fine to leave comments on blogs with a link back to your site, but how many people really do that?  What I mean is how many people leave informative, useful comments and how many leave spam disguised as a comment.  The SEO benefits of backlinks are well-known, as is the easy availability of such links from the multitude of blogs out there.  However, I consider this at best a grey-hat SEO technique.  Most likely it is heading towards a black-hat trick which may be penalised by the search engines eventually (or the link value downgraded).  How they might identify such meaningless comments on blogs is anybody’s guess.

Most blog owners know how to filter the spam, but with scripts hunting the net for suitable hosts to accommodate their parasitic backlinks, it is becoming an epidemic that is turning into a real pain to control.  Are webmasters so desperate to avoid white-hat SEO and valuable unique content that they need to resort to spamming their peers?  I know blog links count for something in terms of SEO value, but it is such a shame to open my blog everyday and first have to sift through the auto-generated comments in my ‘moderate’ list, looking to pick out the ‘real’ comments.

Let us hope Google will continue to improve it’s algorithm and weed out those who try to manipulate it in such a way as to annoy everyone else.  White-hat SEO is the only way to optimise your site and anything else will hopefully eventually be deemed worthless.

How do you choose which dating sites are the most suitable for your needs?  This is a very general question and will of course depend on how specific your ‘needs’ are  Assuming you are an average dating site user, then you will either be looking for a date or for marriage.  Ignoring the latter for now, let us concentrate on the former.  Dating sites contain a huge variety of people, all looking for that special person they wish to hook up with; but when choosing a dating site, you need to read between the lines to determine if you are registering with one which will help you find exactly what you are after.  Many sites are concerned with marriage only.  Not much use if you are after a slowly evolving type of relationship.  Some sites are very specific to a race or ethnic grouping.  Again, this may or may not be what you are after.  Most sites are geographically diverse, which can make it hard to find one with a suitable cross-section of society where you live.

Think of this, Google local search is growing in strength and may impact on how dating sites market themselves.  As it now stands, most dating sites do not fully cater for local searches - it is nearly as if what the user wants is an afterthought and the site is more concerned with money and globalisation.  That is where local searches and social networking sites are starting to kick in.  Traditional dating sites have had it easy in the past as they were basically a self-populating machine that only had to offer users particular info about other members.  However, with the rise of social networking, groups are forming on the likes of Facebook et al, which offer users a more interactive and fulfilling experience.  Events are easily organised, people can offer word-of-mouth appraisals on members, and other such benefits exist which makes members feel part of their network.  Human feedback feeds into these groups and allows communities to form which basically share common interests.  In other words, ideal environments to meet like-minded single people.  I anticipate that this will challenge traditional dating sites to reformulate their marketing strategy as well as their services.

So when choosing a dating site, be aware of the alternatives techniques and social media.  Going to the biggest, does not mean you are going to create the best chance of success.  Some dating site are evolving though and offer both large numbers of people to meet as well as specialised sub-groups within.  It is my bet that these sites will survive and become the de facto style in online dating.

The average age of getting marriage is increasing in so-called developed countries.  In addition, the rate of divorce has also seen a steady rise in recent decades. What are the causes of these trends?  It seems people are not so eager to get married and when they do tie the knot it appears more and more find the institution of marriage is not for them and leave their partner.

I think the trend will settle down and reach a level that reflects the human capacity to make a relationship succeed.  In the past, people stayed in relationships and entered them in the first place for many reasons… few of which were concerned with love.  For instance, security, money, child-rearing, sex, cooked meals and a tidy house, etc.  With the increase in the quality of life and the individualism associated with that freedom, people can afford to do what they feel like doing, as opposed to what they feel they need to do.

It makes me wonder, do relationships fail because humans are just not meant to commit for such a long period of time (to just one other person), or is it because humans are (on the whole) self-centred creatures and are unable to make a relationship work because their individualistic lifestyle makes them incapable of sacrifice and true thoughtfulness.  Maybe people just have it so good that they want it all, sex, money, relationship, etc, but are unable to work to acquire these things… after all, we live in a culture which expects things now.  The thought of spending years of patience, commitment and dedication on another person, just to create that special relationship, is not something that sounds so appealing to people used to getting everything handed to them when they want it.  Maybe Western culture is to blame.

I suspect that eventually, only the truly mature and thoughtful people will succeed in relationships.  It makes you think if you are one of those, or are you kidding yourself about your attitude.  I think to make a relationship work requires each person to be brutally honest about who they are and what they can offer their partner… not what their partner can offer them.  Introspection is something which should be a prerequisite for serious relationships.

What can be done for a dating site in terms of SEO?  How does one go about competing in a near-saturated field with a minimal budget?  There are ways.  How much longer these ‘ways’ will exist is anyone’s guess, but I suspect as the blue chips wade into the SEO foray, their big budgets may blow the smaller players out of the market and these ‘ways’ will cease to be effective.

With any SEO campaign, a website’s strengths need to be played to.  What does your dating site have which gives you an edge over your competitors?  Work hard to carve out this advantage if it does not naturally exist.  Then exploit it by wrapping around it some sort of link bait.  Create a feed highlighting this strength and submit to the feed aggregators.  You need quality links to your site to compete, so be innovative and create the techniques which will lead to people linking to you.  There are various ways to do this.  The trick is to keep thinking of new ideas and to persevere.  Eventually, it will start paying off.

Anna (see relationship blog) is currently working on a thesis concerning the unique issues experienced by people in intercultural relationships.  This work will focus on relationship problems which exist purely as a result of partners misunderstanding each other’s culture and the way a person’s culture can lead to these misunderstandings.  It will form a useful resource for people dating across cultures, as it aims to highlight those issues which are hard to identify as culturally-related and which could be mistaken for personality flaws in one or both partners.  Many arguments will be avoided if people take the time to learn about their partner’s culture and to make allowances for behaviour that may at times seem at odds with what you would expect from a peer from your own background.

Blogs are old news. In terms of SEO, the benefits of blogs will soon weaken. The truth is that people grow tired of their upkeep. It is like getting a shiny new diary for the start of the New Year… within a month or two the diary entries start becoming laboured and infrequent and soon after the unfortunate diary is discarded and dumped in some box to gather dust. Blogs are going the same way. Google will recognise this and inevitably reduce the weighting of blog links. So what now for SEO practitioners, where we will get the links to boost our clients’ campaigns. The answer lies in social networking sites and the proliferation of competition which has crawled out of the woodwork in the last few years. There are various ways to utilise these sites to best effect, but with a little ingenuity (which is what Power-SEO is all about) you can grasp some very promising opportunities in the coming months. I shall not give away my secrets, but watch this space for future updates on the effectiveness of social networking manipulation (SNM). It is a growing area, but blink and you will lose that very vital pole position; so stay on your toes and work out what SNM is all about… once I have to explain it to you then you have already missed the boat.
Will

On the topic of SEO, what actually really works… is there a killer technique to blow away the competition and steal the traffic? Not usually. However, under certain circumstances, it is possible to take advantage of your existing content and use this to give you an edge. In particular I am thinking about link-bait and its careful use in a site which has strong content on a certain subject. The problem with link-bait is that it needs to have that critical x-factor as well as having reached the inbound link critical mass, beyond which it effectively generates it’s own links and becomes a self-propagating link building system. A fair bit of work is usually required to get to this stage. However, there is a way to utilise your existing site strengths to leverage your link bait to that critical mass. As a working example, let us focus on a fictional new site which specialises in selling gourmet food. It has many many competitors and decides to use a link-baiting strategy to boost it’s PR and traffic. How does it go about this?

Here is the strategy. First, create some tools which are popular on your chosen subject, in this example it could be:

• a calorie counter script (to work out how many calories your food contains)
• a script to determine the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process of a certain foodstuff
• a script to tell you which foods are free from a combination of allergy-inducing ingredients

The main point is that the scripts should in themselves be useful and already successful on other sites. Perform a search on Google to get an idea of which scripts/topics (in your chosen area) are most popular. Now, these already-existing scripts are popular and competitive, many sites have them, so we need to specialise a little further. What you need to do is find the most popular scripts which are housed in sites that are more general than the script topic, and rewrite them (to avoid plagiarism).
In this example, I would want to find the most popular scripts which are hosted in sites that are not about food (carbon-footprint scripts would fit this criteria, so let us focus on this). It sounds like a lost cause, but actually it is not, there are many cases of top tools being hosted in more general type sites. The crux of this strategy is that you choose a tool which is predominantly hosted on pages/sites, which have less naturally occuring keyword-rich content than your own site.

In this example, I could decide to create a page on my example site with my own scripts on carbon-footprint calculations for ethanol crop production (which is becoming a hot topic). Other sites’ carbon-footprint scripts are surrounded by content on global warming and the like. My site, which contains many terms related to the production of ethanol providing crops, such as sugar beet etc (all food related terms), will be in a relatively strong position to compete against these more popular sites for keyword phrases connected with the use of food for producing energy. In this case it is a topical subject, your content is more relevant to the tool in question and hence you stand a good change of Google ranking your tool quite highly for popular keywords. The end result is that your tool could rise up the rankings and displace higher PR sites with similar tools. Once you do that, your link-bait is there for the taking and has exposure to people who are looking for it.
Once people can find your tool in the SERP’s, they will naturally link to it from their blogs etc. The knock-on positive effects could be dramatic as the inbound links raise your PR and swell your traffic.
Will

Having recently looked at some SEO parameters in more detail, I decided to perform an experiment to determine the effect that content subject has on PR.  Without going into the details of the experiment, which involved two pages on a site with slightly different content, I am able to conclude that the number of different subject threads can adversely affect the page’s PR.  For instance, if you keep on topic and write about one thing in particular (e.g. Dating) then the page will have a particular PR that it will assign for your dating page (remember PR is relative to your peers, which means you are compared with pages of similar subject type across the Internet).  If over time you ‘dilute’ that page by also including references to another distinct topic (e.g. Running), then I believe Google will allow you to rank for both subjects, but will effectively dilute the PR of each one.  It makes sense for them to do this, as it reflects how dedicated the content of your page is.  Spread your content over various distinct subjects and Google will assume you are less competitive for each of those topics than if you had written about just one.  This is worth bearing in mind if you have a blog which you are using for commercial purposes.  Keep on subject and don’t dilute your PR by spanning subject domain too much.

Well, not quite a new blog, just an old one restarted.  I have been very busy recently working on some contract work and the Click in Love dating site is very much delayed.  Nevertheless, a little work is still ongoing and we hope to have something functional soon enough.  In addition, I hope to keep this blog up-to-date and informative.  Will post here any major progress that is made.

The Click in Love Dating site is still very much near completion, but unfortunately still not actually complete.  Due to a plethora of last minute tasks, I find myself swamped with too much work and not enough time to do it all.  I hope the site will be live soon, so keep reading this blog to see when the launch date is.  Nevertheless, it is still possible to register and avail of the forum (linked to from the front page of this blog).

The Firefox browser extension I was working on has been put on hold for a while whilst I try to finish some other work. However that does not mean the extension is not worthwhile. On the contrary, it is extremely valuable as it will ease the workload in performing SEO link-building. As anyone who has worked in SEO will know, link-building is a nasty, often thankless task, which is time-consuming and unpleasant.

What is AJAX and how can it contribute to my site? AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And Xml. Practically what this means, is the use of pre-exisiting technologies to create a technique which allows a client-side script to interact with the server, which otherwise is not normally achievable. In layman’s terms, it means a browser is able to allow user-interaction with a back-end database, without the need for time-costly page reloads. For instance, the way pre-AJAX sites used to verify login data, was to take user input, call a server-side script and analyse the user data, before sending a response back to the user via a page redirect. AJAX cuts out the page redirect and allows a Javascript function to grab the output of the server-side script (a PHP script for example) via the HTTP headers. This means, due to Javascript’s ability to edit the DOM in real-time, that responses can be placed on the page where the user entered their login data. No more page redirects, better increased speed of data processing and less bandwidth usage.

I recently lost the entire contents of my Blog due to a combination of failing to make a satisfactory backup and some bug with a plugin. I was writing my Blog last night when my hand slipped and hit the keyboard, somewhere on the number pad section. All of a sudden, 4 Wordpress plugins (which I had installed but not enabled), were suddenly activated, my them changed and my database was deleted. That was about 7 months of blogging thrown away. So be careful with your backups and your plugins. Always make sure you backup your database as often as possible.

Today I noticed that Google Webmaster tools got another upgrade. In the statistics section you are now able to track previous months statistics, which is useful for trend analysis. I am not sure how accurate these stats are, but even if they are only a rough indication, it is better than nothing.
Will