Archive for July, 2009
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
We are glad to announce that SkaDate dating and social networking software has made one more grade on its way of constant improvement. We have released a 7.1295 build that introduces a set of new features for making your online community even more entertaining for members. The new update also features a few significant improvements for site administrators.
Check the list of features now available in the new SkaDate software revision:
- Groups
- Photo albums
- 123FlashChat
- Possibility to disable base profile fields
- SMTP protocol support
- New online Admin Panel Manual
Now let me provide a more detailed description of each feature.
Groups
This feature allows member to create and join sub-networks (Groups) on your site to share their interests and affiliations. Group members can hold discussions on a private Group Forum inaccessible for non-members, post comments, add or remove the ‘Groups’ component on their profile view page. The Group administration interface allows to set them private or public, and available for joining to anybody or by invitation only. A sub-network creator can also assign moderators and upload a Group image.
Photo Albums
This feature allows your site members to organize their photos in Albums according to their preferences. Photos can be easily moved from one album to another. The number of photos allowed per album is set up by the Site Administrator via Admin Panel. The members will be able to enable or disable the ‘Photo Albums’ component on their profile page.
123FlashChat
In order to entertain multiple requests of our customers we have integrated a new popular audio/video chat into SkaDate software – 123FlashChat, which is a high-quality one-time fee add-on featuring custom skins and logo.
Possibility to disable base profile fields
SkaDate software with its impressing number of features doesn’t lock you down with just creating a dating site. It provides you with all the opportunities for developing a social network featuring blogs, photo and video sharing, albums (new!), groups (new!) and latest activity. Today we are glad to introduce one more option for your members to feel even more comfortable in your online community. It’s a possibility for a Site Administrator to disable such base profile fields as ‘I am’ and ‘Looking for’ which served mainly for dating purposes. Now there is nothing in the way to making your social network even more professional.
SMTP protocol support
Now you can improve your site performance by discharging the server you host on. This feature allows you to choose any server supporting SMTP for the purpose of sending mail from your site. It has become possible to send site e-mails even from your Gmail account!
Online Admin Panel Manual
And here comes good news for Site Administrators – an online version of the Admin Panel Manual is available. Each Admin Panel page now has a ‘Help’ link in an upright corner to a corresponding Online Manual section, thus, making it a lot easier for you to find answers to major questions on adjusting the Admin Panel settings instantly. And no need to worry about the Manual format compatibility with your computer operating system. The latest version of the Manual can be easily accessed through any browser, so you just need an Internet connection.
New build also includes bug fixes, security and performance enhancements for you to get the best of your online venture and make your business more secure. This is why we strongly recommend you to go for this update.
That was a brief description of major innovations of the new SkaDate 7.1295 build. But as they say, ‘one look is worth a thousand words’, so take some time to check the Live Demo and experience all features of our online dating software.
We will be glad to read your comments, impressions and suggestions for the new SkaDate revision.
Best wishes,
Irene
Update: We have integrated a new site template into 7.1295 software build. Now you have even more choices for making your site look attractive and professional.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags: community software · dating software · site template · SkaDate · social networking · update
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Now that you have done a great job on selecting the relevant keywords for your site, it’s time to talk about using them on your site efficiently. Well, the word ‘efficiency’ in the given context is something that cannot stand apart from using meta tags.
Basically, meta tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to help search engines list your site accurately in their indexes by providing structured data about your webpage content. Other than the Title tag, meta tags are not 
visible to the users and serve exclusively to allow search engines and browsers to ‘deal’ with your site more easily and effectively.
Below you fill find a few tips on how to use the meta tags efficiently to make search engines (and users!) like your site.
The title tag– should contain brief information about your site; the total summary of keywords for this tag should not exceed 60 characters, but still try to make it as descriptive as you can since search engines will use it as a title for your listing.
Example: <title> Free matchmaking, online dating service for pet lovers singles and their pets </title>
The meta tag – Keywords attribute – this is actually the place for ’storing’ all your keywords. You can add about 1000 characters into this section (commas and spaces count as characters too). Avoid repeating same keywords often (not more than 4-7 times).
Example: <META content=”online dating, dating, matchmaking, pet lovers, pets, cat owner dating, dog owner dating, singles, animal lovers, pet dating, pet health”>
The meta tag – Description attribute – allows you to write the description of what your site is about, which is going to be recognized by some search engines. About 150 characters should be enough for your description to express the site conception, but some search engines allow you for about 400.
Example: <META content=”A dating site for single pet lovers, looking for friendship and love with like-minded personals”>
It is advised that you use meta tags on each page of your site (they should be inserted inside the <HEAD> section of the page). This helps better indexation by search engines and thus, increases your chances for good ranking.
The good question is how to add meta tags to your site. Normally, this can be done through one of the HTML-editors, like Nvu or Dreamweaver. But SkaDate community software developers simplified the process of adding meta information to your dating or social networking site by bringing it to inserting codes to all the site pages right from the Admin Panel/SEO section. You can also add a unique meta title and description to each page via Admin Panel/Languages.
Now let me give you a few pieces of advice on how to get the most out of your relationship with a search engine.
- Make sure that your website textual content includes all the relevant keywords you selected for search engines. And remember that the keywords density should not exceed 5-10%.
- Check all the links on your site. There shouldn’t be any broken or irrelevant links.
- For some important site content (names, links, information) use text rather than images, since Google bots do not recognize text in images. Or at least always use alt=”keyword” tag for your images.
- Each page of your site has to be reachable from a at least one static text link.
- Make sure your site is displayed correctly in all browsers.
- Be attentive when it comes to affiliate programs – try to avoid using the textual content on your site identical to content on the other web sources. This may bring you to something opposite to success.
- Be careful using other business’ trademarks among your keywords as this may lead to legal issues in regards to possible misleading the potential users.
And here come a few ‘DON’Ts’ that may not only fail to help you in SEO, but at worst will lead to search engines terminating all kinds of interaction with your site by banning it out from the search results.
- Don’t go for Black Hat SEO (Spamdexing), which includes keyword stuffing (loading pages with keywords irrelevant to the site content) and link farms (a group of websites containing hyperlinks to each-other).
- Don’t use programs sending automated queries to Google, say, for checking the site rank status in search results for various queries.
- Don’t place hidden text or links on your site pages. Here I mean text invisible to site visitors, but available to Google crawlers.
- Don’t allow duplicate content.
- Don’t use cloaking (which is displaying different page content to users and to Google bots)
- Don’t create ‘doorway’ pages intended for crawlers rather than for site users.
These simple rules for managing your site content will help you avoid common mistakes causing unwanted consequences and establish friendly and long-term relationship with search engines.
If you have something to say on this subject – don’t hesitate to leave the article comments expressing your opinion!
Best wishes,
Irene
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community software · keywords · search engine optimization · SEO · SkaDate · social networking
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
After you have chosen the right community script for creating a dating site, thought of a good site conception, obtained a relevant domain name and design, the next crucial question is ‘How do I make people know about my network?’. The obvious answer is ‘through search engines!’. You will hear nothing new if I say that your online venture success strongly depends on its position in search results. Top positions promise you thousands of members, loads of advertisers and sizeable income. So you should do your best to help your site become search-engine-friendly by addressing tools and methods of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO – is the process of attracting a flow of traffic to your website from search engines based on their principles of work and on what people mostly tend to look for. The first and most important step in this compound process is choosing the right keywords for your site to be found on the web.
Think like a customer. ‘Keywords’ is what a user types in the search field hoping to find a relevant match to his expectations in search results. So, to start the suitable keywords ‘exploration’ from the right point, put yourself in your potential customer’ shoes. The question to ask is ”what words or word combinations would I use looking for an online
community like mine?”. Looking for an answer, don’t forget to consider the opinion of your friends and colleagues – ask as many people as possible. Recall the words or phrases you used searching for your competitors on the web. Take into account the geographical language peculiarities (the British will definitely use the word ‘flat’ referring to mortgage instead of the traditional American ‘apartment’). Analyze the list of suggestions you’ll get. It makes sense to use keyword combinations (phrases) besides single keywords, as normally people can’t express what they look for in just one word. But keep in mind that a keyword phrase should not contain more than 3-5 main words.
Useful tip: Making a keywords list, take into account common misspellings too, especially when it comes to words with difficult orthography.
Quantity or quality? After making a list of words and word combinations referring to your site conception, ‘examine’ them on search engines: type a word combination (say, ‘dating site’) and see how many results you get. Millions. Well, you have found the popular keyword combination… and tones of competitors as a ‘makeweight’. Check 
out the top 10 sites appearing in search results. I bet they have hundreds of pages and most likely thousands of incoming links. This means that winning top positions from these sites will require not less than those hundreds of pages developed and thousands of links acquired by you. If you are just starting your online dating business, remember that it’s ‘better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion’, so we advise to begin with more specific keywords rather than broad ones. Specific keywords will attract fewer visitors to your site, no doubts. But at the same time they will give you significantly more chances to reach top positions in search results. Another advantage of such ’specification’ is that it will more likely bring you visitors belonging to your target audience as compared to fairly competitive broad keywords attracting a number of ‘occasional guests’. So using, for instance, a ‘pet lovers dating site’ (as opposed to a ‘dating site’) keyword combination dramatically cuts down competition and increases chances to involve some really interested potential members into your online community.
Useful tip: If you are offering goods or services for some specific region, be sure to include your location to the keywords list. This will dramatically increase your competitiveness on the targeted market.
More inspiration sources. The keywords choosing strategy based only on your own thoughts and anticipation may be quite not bad, but this is surely not sufficient for a solid-foundation SEO. In order to have a more or less detailed vision of what traffic result to expect from the keywords selected by you, and to get more ideas for choosing new keywords based on some facts and statistics you will need to refer to keyword research tools. Here are just some of them, but you can always find more on the web:
Google Keyword Tool was actually developed for Google AdWords subscibers, but you can still use it for getting a free list of keywords matching your site idea with indication of search volumes.
WordTracker allows you to make a more detailed research of your keywords. For example, it can check a certain keyword’s popularity (how many times it appeared in more than 30 million search queries) and can even generate a report on maximum total predicted traffic for different search engines. Beware though, that data supplied by this resource may not always be 100% true and it is meant to give you a general view only.
Go for keyword density checkers too. They will help you analyze the ‘keyword cloud’ (visual depiction of keywords used on a website) and keywords density, which should be about 5-10%, according to common sense.
Apart from the Internet sources mentioned above, you can do the following:
Check the server log files. The information on the words used by visitors to find your site through search engines is stored in your server log files. It can be helpful for you to determine the main keywords and key phrases to target, and will probably give you inspiration for new ideas.
One more useful practice is checking what keywords were used by your competitors. For that you need to go to your rival’s site page and right-click on it, then choose the ‘view page source’ option. It will show the page in HTML format. Now you just need to find the ‘keywords’ string. Remember that you are not doing this for copying (plagiarizing) your competitor’s keywords list (if the keywords are trademarked – you could be penalized), but for learning how to choose and set them up right.
My final advice is – use only those keywords that reflect the true content of your site. Inserting simply most searched keywords and phrases may be tempting, but this will most likely lead you to being banned by search engines.
That was the basic information needed for choosing the right keywords for your site. But this is just the first step. In further posts you will find tips on how to optimize your site content, what practices to avoid, where to submit your site for search engines indexation and many more useful things.
I look forward to reading your comments!
Best wishes,
Irene
Posted in Marketing | Tags: choose keywords · community script · dating site · keywords · SEO
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
As a part of our recent SkaDate customer support optimization and reorganization we are happy to introduce several new things that are now available for you in SkaDate Customer Area. Among those are:
1) Public support forum waiting for you at http://www.skadate.com/ca/forum/. For now we are filling it with How-to’s and FAQs for your convenience. You can also post questions and problems you face when using SkaDate. As the time flows there will be more common solutions discussed with SkaDate support operators. So if you face a a problem there will be a good chance to find a solution instantly. Feel free to ask questions, we are listening!
2) Feature suggestion tool at http://suggest.skadate.com/ is up for your convenience. It’s much more effective than now defunct Skalfa Boards and allows customers and anyone else suggest what they think is right for SkaDate. This is a good way for you to suggest your idea and for us to monitor demand.
3) Online documentation at http://www.skadate.com/ca/docs/ now comes instead of old .CHM manuals. Now all manuals will be in one place and universally accessible. We also introduce linking from SkaDate software admin area to corresponding parts of the online manual. Also it’s a more effective way for us to maintain and update the relevant version of every document for your ease and convenience.
Tell us what we can do to further improve SkaDate support.
Posted in News, Products, SkaDate | Tags: documentation · suggest feature · support
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
Conducting an online business on the web, you get to understand that the main impression you make on your target audience is visual impression. ‘Clothes count…’ – this old saying is more than true when it comes to attracting potential members to a dating site or a social network. So choosing the right template is almost as important as choosing the domain name, which is going to be your website’s ‘trademark’. It will help to create a certain mood to your members – either cheerful and ready-to-make-friends or sensual and appealing – depending on the site conception. A carefully chosen social network template can make an occasional site visitor feel interest and finally stay a part of your online community for long. While a poor and tacky-colored design will definitely ‘help’ you lose a potential member in a flicker. And that’s the reason why a whole division in marketing studies the influence of various color combinations to consumers’ activity. Below you will find a few examples of what emotions people associate with different colors, and how you can use this psychological tool depending on the goals you want to achieve.
Black – is a very strong color. It is a color of authority, stability and power. It is also associated with elegance and luxurious classics. It makes other colors look ’sharer’ and helps to create an atmosphere of mystery. Since it evokes strong emotions, too much of black may be overwhelming for your site members, so try to dilute it by adding more bright colors.
White – is associated with innocence, purity and simplicity. It has a calming and stabilizing influence. It does not irritate the eye and allows for a relatively large number of colorful components (if chosen as a template background).
Red – is a color of love, passion, excitement, aggression and energy. It’s the color stimulating all kinds of appetites. So it’s an indispensable color for those creating adult websites.
Blue – is likely the world’s favorite color. It is associated with calmness and trustworthiness. The darker shades of blue are ideal for businesses, as they symbolize financial stability, professionalism and loyalty. White-and-blue templates are ideal for business networks. Light blue colors give a feeling of freshness and cleanliness and get you in the careless mood.
Yellow – implies laughter, sunshine, happiness and amusement. Yellow color helps our brain release more serotonin, which makes us feel cheerful and energetic. Using this color in the right place and amount can become a powerful tool for involving new members into your social network.
Green – is known to be a relaxing color associated with nature, money and health. It is pleasant for the senses and has a calming effect.
Orange – color is tied with fun, pleasure, energy, warmth. An interesting thing is that it can make expensive products seem more affordable. This color is sharp and vibrant and implies anything but calmness.
Golden – is considered to be a color symbolizing wealth. Having a few golden components in your design will give it a classy look drawing attention.
Grey – is associated with solid and practical things. Silver color (a hue of grey) represents high tech. Too much of grey in design will most likely leave a dull impression. But adding just a few grey components will give that necessary rock solidity to your website (especially if that is a business network).
When choosing a design for your site, give strong attention to the color combination, which should be harmonious and selected in accordance with chromatic color scheme principles.
Take a look at one of the examples of a ‘color wheel’
So, here are some basics on color combination, which will hopefully guide you in the right direction:
Monochromatic color scheme – is based on combining different shades of one color segment (for example, darker and lighter shades of blue). Such design gives a site a pleasant, clean and integral look.
Complimentary color scheme – is using contrast colors, which are opposite to each other on the ‘color wheel’. Such warm-and-cold combination will look fresh and lively. One of the best examples of such scheme is combining light green and pink.
Triple color scheme – is built on using colors equally standing out from each other in the chromatic circle (such as red, yellow and blue).
Analogue color scheme – uses three color segments neighboring each other in the color circle. Such design will be colorful and harmonious.
Also, don’t forget about your target audience ethnic habits. For example, Asian people prefer red color, while the Dutch incline to orange.
SkaDate community script offers a wide range of site templates to meet your taste and needs. But we also thought of our customers who want to be different from others. SkaDate dating software designers will be happy to assist you in giving your site a unique look either by developing a custom template or by integrating your own design into the script.
Remember that people do judge by the cover. So, give it a strong attention as this is one more step to the top of success.
As usual, you are welcome to leave your comments. I will be glad to read them.
Best wishes,
Irene
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating software · SkaDate · social network template
