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
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
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Although introduced not so long ago, the sms-billing service has been coming to the fore among the well-known and trustworthy payment methods. What is the reason for its growing popularity?
It’s pretty easy to explain by turning to any customer’s psychology: they want to get goods and services quickly, safely and not having to go through a 
number of sophisticated steps. SMS-billing meets all these requirements providing security along with mobility. No need to expose the credit card details, no need to wait for the transaction to be completed – with sms-payment you get what you want instantly, no need to think about cash – short messages are relatively cheap, and you take these expenses as a part of your monthly telephone bill (which is also an important psychological aspect).
This payment method is convenient and beneficial not only for consumers (site members in our case), but also for vendors. First of all, if you are on the second team, it gives you an opportunity to make the subscription for your site easier and more affordable. Imagine the situation with a Free member, who receives an offer from another user to chat tête-a-tête, but his membership does not include the private messaging service. Most people being in his shoes would prefer paying only for this particular feature (by pressing a few buttons on their mobile device and getting instant access to the desired service) as opposed to purchasing the monthly membership through one of the online payment providers, which would take more time, trouble and funds. Well, I would… as well as the major part of the European countries’ population. It does not mean that sms-payments have to be a substitute for your traditional membership plans, but they can be a great add-on to the process of monetizing your online dating business. A simple calculation shows that depending on the number of your site members and the fee you set up for the site services, you could get hundreds to thousands dollars daily on top of income from subscriptions.
Representing a well-known software company – which is SkaDate – I can’t help saying a few words about how we follow the sms-boom tendency developing new features for our community script and dating software. SkaDate 7 dating software programmers introduced a number of new useful features for members, including the sms-billing. For now it does not cover a wide range of site services: only ‘hot list’ and ‘24-hour trial membership’. We are studying the response of our audience (since our product is mostly USA-oriented) in order to decide if we should go ahead with expanding this feature. But in case you decide to be on the pacesetters team offering the sms-billing service on their sites to show all its advantages to the members, SkaDate team will gladly help you with this. There are 2 world-famous sms-payment providers already integrated into our script: DaoPay and Zong. So to customize the software for adding more items into the list of site features paid by sms will be a lot easier (since the sms billing system itself is 
already present in the program). You could modify the script by yourself (if you have enough coding knowledge), or leave that to our high-skilled developers team. Another option is visiting the SkaDate Certified Specialists website – the guys who know the product really well and provide high quality assistance on any script modifications.
Logically, we have come up to the moment, where I should start speaking about the disadvantages of using sms-billing for your online venture. One is that this payment method is yet to strike root in the USA, where people still prefer tried-and-true PayPal, CCBill and Authorize.net… And for now I can’t think of any more cons, so if you have thoughts on this aspect – you are most welcome to share them by leaving the post comments.
I am looking forward to reading your responses!
Best wishes,
Irene
Posted in Miscellaneous, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating · dating software · payment method · SkaDate · SMS billing · software
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
SkaDate released a new dating software build – SkaDate 7.1201. The main features delivered in the SkaDate 7.1201 build are:
-Top rated blog lists
-Polls
-French and Italian languages
-Three new community and dating templates
-Custom Backgrounds admin approve tool
-IM/Chat Smiles;
-FavIcon
-Members’ photo count;
-Paging for Friend Lists;
- Apply photo watermark to all photos
-Admin photo upload tool
-My Saved Searches
- Latest Activity
- Status Line
Three new well designed templates: Color Touch II, Emotion and Dating Shine.
SkaDate presents three new templates for dating sites and social networks. Starting or running a social network and a dating web site seems to be a daunting task, but with the new great looking templates you may attract more members who will love your web site. SkaDate web designers sharpen their skills on continuing basis and gladden us with their artworks. Take a look at the templates:
Polls
Here are screen shots of the admin and user interfaces of the Pools feature. You may easily create a new poll and set particular answers to your questions. This feature is useful for collecting your members’ feedback which can be used for the analysis of their needs and desires.
Custom Backgrounds admin approve tool.
Sometimes it is necessary to check your members’ background images to prevent using copyrighted materials. Here are screen shots of the admin interface of this feature:
IM/Chat Smiles
Smiles is a common feature of a number instant messengers and chats on the net and now you may express your emotions by using smiles in SkaDate dating software chat and IM.
FavIcon
You may upload your favorite icon and your members will see it in a browser. SkaDate.com has its own favicon. Favicon maybe your logotype or any other picture you want to show in front of your web address.
Number of members photos.
This improvement helps your members to see how many photos a member has without looking at her profile.
Admin photo upload tool.
This feature was in SkaDate 6 and we recoded it for SkaDate 7 basing on customers’ feedback. Now administrators may upload photos to a member’s profile.
My Saved Searches
We made it easier for your members to save their searches. If your member finds a number of interesting profiles he may save the search and it will be available at his fingertips – Member Home page. He can look the profiles again and initiate contact with members at your dating web site or social network.
Latest activity.
Well this feature was long awaited by our customers and we developed it for them. I guess you know this feature from the famous FaceBook™ where you can see the activity of your friends and your activity will be shown to your friends as well. This status section displays the latest activity of your friends, take a look at the below screen shot.
Status line.
This feature is also cool and you can type anything you have in your mind thereby express your mood. Your updates will be shown in the latest activity at your friends’ member home pages. In my mind the status line feature is a perfect feature that will appeal to a set of users.
The build also includes several dating software enhancements and minor fixes. As always SkaDate professionally trained web developers made a good job and developed a number of useful features for online dating web sites and social networks. Feel free to check SkaDate 7 Demo.
SkaDate 7.1201 is a free build to SkaDate 7 license owners and is available for use.
What are your thoughts on the 7.1201 build, and which features are you most interested in using? Please share your opinion.
Posted in Miscellaneous, News, SkaDate | Tags: community script · dating software · dating templates · online dating · SkaDate
