If you have studied SEO to improve the search engine rankings of your online dating site, we are sure you have come across the importance of link building. SEO experts all agree that backlinks can fuel a website from obscurity to the top of page one on Google, but only if they are set up correctly.
That last point about doing backlinks correctly needs to be considered very carefully because countless business owners have tried to use backlinks to support their SEO efforts but have found them to have had no measurable effect. Worse, if you set up backlinks in the wrong way, Google can penalise your website and send its rankings plummeting.
The solution to all this is to ensure that your backlinking strategy identifies online locations from which a backlink will help your rankings.
Some of the key principles you need to follow are;
- 1) To seek out high-quality backlinks,
- 2) Seek relevant links rather than simply going after as many links as you can,
- 3) To diversify the types of backlinks you use in terms of the sort of websites they come from, and
- 4) To create the links at a natural rate, rather than adding them all on the same day.
Let us look at these principles in a bit more detail
Quality Backlinks
When Google is assessing the backlinks that are going to your online dating site it will be checking which websites are linking to you and based on the authority of those websites it will apply that to your ranking. One way of looking at this is as a type of online popularity contest, and if websites that Google considers to be authority websites are linking to you, then it gives your website credit for that. So, seek backlinks from bigger and more authoritative websites if you can.
Relevant Backlinks
One of Google’s obsessions is that their search results are relative to the searches people enter, which is why the more you can identify your website for the keywords you want to rank for, the better. An excellent way to do so is by creating backlinks and using anchor text which are obviously relevant, which in your case would mean keywords and websites which are clearly related to dating, relationships, singles, meet-ups, and so on.
Diverse Backlinks
Google has a very keen eye for anything which looks as though it is trying to game their ranking system, and that means that whatever backlinking campaign you are following, it should not create any red flags. One would be backlinks which all look the same and use the exact same anchor text and keywords. What you want are backlinks that come from a diverse range of websites, so forums, social media, e-commerce, and blogs, for example, and which use a range of keywords.
Natural Accumulation
One of the biggest mistakes we see is business owners adding over 100 backlinks in one day, then none for a few weeks then adding another 100 on another single day. Google spots this and it immediately tells them that this is a contrived attempt at adding backlinks and thus they give no credit for them whatsoever. Even if you have over 100 backlinks in the pipeline, do not add them all at once. Instead, create a few each day as this looks natural, and will help your rankings.