I have been running an internet dating site for over 12 months now and the last 12 months has been very busy. Our company is split into two sides one is development and the other is search engine optimization. Lately even more focus has been spent on SEO and here is what we have learned over the last 12 months.

First off it can be very helpful to read all of the good SEO blogs out there but that can also make you paranoid. There are plenty of bloggers trying to make money by telling you there so called secrets about SEO. The problem with this is many of the secrets will do one of two things, not work or only work for a short period of time. This is what truly makes this internet game exciting and really frustrating at the same time.

Many of the suggestion even the so called white hat techniques are so short term that they are hardly worth doing in the first place. The core of what Google wants to see and what they deem to be first listing worthy hasn’t really changed over the last 4 years. Here is that not so secret list of things that are often easy to write out and can be very challenging to bring to fruition.

First and often over looked is how easy is your site for Google to find and read. You need to make the pages accessible to the search engine crawler. Here are a few ways of doing this, build a proper site map and tell Google about it, use related title tags, meta tags and make sure this is all related to the traffic you are trying to go after.

Next is targeting the keywords that your potential clients are typing. This is something that needs special attention and you should research your market thoroughly before targeting a specific keyword. You should also focus on no more than 4 keywords and when you find ones that are better don’t panic and change focus.

Content is very important and it should be more than just text on your site. It needs to be related and updated regularily, Google loves it when a site is adding pages on a regular basis. At the end of the day if you focus on content that your users will find value added which really should be the main reason you’re doing it chances are Google will like it to.

Links, earning links from good sources is huge and is often called the most important part of any SEO program. Anchor text links inside related content is going to be the best bet for earning Google’s trust. Building links isn’t easy and don’t bother trying to buy links, it’s not worth the effort, money and it’s definitely not worth getting caught.

This is a small list but certainly goes over the most important parts of any good SEO campaign. Best of luck to all of you in and out of the internet dating world.

This article was written by Shawn Wilson, a member of the customer support team at Datepad, where internet dating is always free. Datepad has a massive directory of informative dating articles along with a great list of dating site reviews on their dating blog.