FabulousEntertainment

I’m delighted to say that Google has finally started sending us new members! We’ve had 20 in the past 7 days as a result of Google searches. It took about 8 months and I have to admit I was beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get coverage but I guess it does just need a bit of patience.

We’ve also been doing quite well with Swingers in Ireland recently and I would really like to see if we can really build up this market. It’s pretty badly served and there is virtually no competition so it should be relatively easy.

What a relief! Just did a site:www.fabswingers.com query in Google today and I’m delighted to say that all of the pages are coming back. Just last week, virtually of the pages were being held back as “supplementary results”.

I believe that this meant that Google thought the pages were all much too similar so wasn’t giving them any weight due to having meta description tags that were virtually the same. There is some circumstantial evidence too because I noticed that we were finally getting some Google traffic recently and I think this happened at roughly the same time we exited supplementary purgatory with our meta description sins atoned for.

Two interesting bits of news:

1. The Compete.com Blog reports that the casual sex section of Craigslist is it’s most popular area - and of course Craigslist itself is one of the most popular websites in the world.
2. AdultFriendFinder (the 30th most visited website in the UK according to Alexa today) is reported to gross over $200m which is in the same ball park as Yahoo’s $269 million results from last quarter.

The other cheering bit of news is that I’ve had a couple of people mailing me today volunteering to help with the site. I think that’s very positive and our secret weapon!

I’ve wanted to be in Jane’s Guide for absolutely ages. I really respect what they do and I think it would be a real stamp of approval for the site if we got listed.

I applied today and I really hope that they list us.

If they do I’ll plaster the Jane’s Quality logo all over the site!

Searching for my favourite uk swingers site on Google.com using the term “uk swingers” and we are at the very top of page 39. Doing the same search on Google.co.uk and we are nearer the bottom of page 50.

On Yahoo we’re result 125 on page 13 and on MSN (I do love you Microsoft!) we’re on the top of page 2!

So what’s the problem? I think it’s still a question of trust.

Here’s some of my thoughts as to how I can increase trust of the site:

• Age. Simple sitting back and letting the site get older will automatically build trust. The SEO blogs talk about 6-9 months and I know that once the site is a few years old it will be really trusted. The site is profitable so I can (and will!) wait as long as it takes but it would be nice to move a bit faster…
• Longer domain registration. I registered fabswingers.com for only 1 year. This was a mistake, I should have registered it for 10 years, I am absolutely certain this is a key factor in trust. Unfortunately Yahoo, who I registered the domain thru, doesn’t seem to allow me to extend the registration period.
• SSL certificate. I noticed that this on a site today and I guess it does make sense that sites with an SSL certificate are likely to be more serious than those without.
• Register with Google Local. I’m sure that verifying our postal address with Google will be helpful.
• Contact information. Supplying contact information both on the website and in the domain registration will probably help.
• Registering with a “trust” service. HackerSafe from ScanAlert which is about $159 per month
• Better content. More detailed and bigger content, possibly including PDF’s. Unfortunately a lot of the pages of the site are quite small and badly spelled - but this is the problem with user generated content!
• Being really careful with our linking - in particular not exchanging links with dodgy site.
• Links from high quality sites. We’ve got some but as ever we need more!

I am a bit reluctant to spend money on any of these trust items, I think that if I am going to spend money I’d rather spend it on PPC or affiliate fees that I know will generate members rather than something softer.

Well, I admit it. I’ve made two silly on-page SEO cock-ups.

First, on every page I put a meta description tag with the same text. I’ve since realised that it’s absolutely fine not to have meta description tags but if you do have description tags they have to be unique otherwise Google will often view your pages as being duplicates. This is exactly what’s happening on the site, with only three pages visible on a site: search but thousands available when I ask for the similar results to be shown.

Incidentally, I also found out today that WordPress makes exactly this mistake by default. The solution is to install one of the metadata plugins. However I’m not that bothered about the SEO for this blog.

My second error was on the page design of the member profiles, which amount for the vast bulk of the site. I had the username as the sole h1 title. Now, I do have a nice title field which contains lots of keyword rich text but unfortunately I chose the username which is usually a nonsense word. This will give Google a strong indication that all the profiles are nonsense!

I’ve fixed both problems now but I suspect it will take a while for everything to get properly reindexed.

I think that these two mistakes could explain why on some of my keywords we’re on page one of Live Search but not visible in the first 30 pages of Google.

I’ve had a go at creating some profiles on a few social networking sites. I put a profile on Yahoo! 360° and on MySpace.

Both profiles have been quite successful, currently I’ve converted a lot more from Yahoo! than from MySpace which may seem surprising but although MySpace is a much bigger community it seems to be easier to find the right people on Yahoo. My sign-up conversion rate from the Yahoo profile is currently hovering around 18%.

With both sites it’s really important to understand that simply creating a profile is pretty pointless, you really need to get involved in the communities by joining groups and inviting lots of appropriate people to become friends. As well as recruiting lots of new members I think it may have been good for link building, it’s certainly set my Google Alerts off several since times since I started.

Technically I much prefer Yahoo! 360° to MySpace, one of the nice features is the ability to add RSS feeds to your profile, so I’ve added a feed of new swingers to the profile which is working pretty well.

Recently I’ve switched my focus somewhat from email marketing of the site to SEO. The email marketing so far has done okay, and is reliably bringing in between 100 to 200 members a week which is keeping the site fresh and interesting for the members. However to reach my 1 million members target at 200 members a week would take 96 years!

The only way I can get a step change up to the 1000 per day level or more that I need is through getting a chunk of the huge volumes of searches done on swinging-related topics. So, I’ve just been busy re-working the titles of my member profiles to include the city and state which I think should help us score on city searches which are pretty common. I’ve also made sure that every profile has got a unique meta description and unique meta keywords. To be honest I’m not sure how effective that will be but it won’t do any harm.

The SEO is beginning and I am now getting sign-ups from Yahoo and MSN (on MSN Fab Swingers now comes up on page 2 for searches for “uk swingers”!) so I am making some progress. Nothing really happening on Google yet though but I’m sure that is just a question of time.

Finally, I’ve been continuing with the link building. It’s quite tedious but I am getting there one link at a time. I’m not bothering at all with the lower-quality sites, I’m going very much for quality over quantity which I’m sure will work out much better.

I’m very keen for Fab Swingers to be the UK Swingers site and to be on page 1 of the search engines for this term.

Here’s how it’s performing right now:

• MSN: Page 9
• Yahoo: Page 12 (Result 115)
• Google: Not in top 30 page

On Google the first five sites returned have PageRanks of 4, 4, 2, 3 and 3 respectively so once I’ve built a bit more trust there’s no reason why I can’t get on page 1.

I suspect that the main issue on Google is that the site isn’t old enough yet, the consensus seems to be that a new site needs 6-9 months before it’ll rank on competitive terms on Google.

Finally, I’ve also kicked off a blog, the UK Swingers Guide which I’m going to use to talk about the subject and hopefully build up a bit of readership.

According to the Google Toolbar we now have a PageRank of 3! I’m delighted! Maybe someone at Google read my previous post?