Focusing on the detail can make all the difference when it comes to SEO. The importance of on-site SEO increases in relation to the total number of pages on your dating site. What might seem like a small thing to you, may not be so when it’s repeated 100,000 within your site template.
But what about much smaller sites? There are a lot of basic Search Engine Optimisation checks you can do with very little technical knowledge, all helping make small improvements to your site…and your ranking
Here’s our top 5.

1. The 3 second page content check

Do users know what your site is about?
Load a random page on your website and ask someone not familiar with it to tell you what that page is about after a 3 second look.
Humans are actually really great at scan reading and picking up subtle hints on content: If a human can’t clearly grasp the content of a page within a few seconds, a machine (like a search engine robot) is really going to struggle.
What you are checking for:
In terms of search engine optimisation, page titles should be optimised to reflect the individual content of that page. You can also optimise the layout of content to make the depth of content clearer for users and search engines.

2. The link check

Is navigation intuitive?
Load a random page on your website. Ignore everything except links to other pages. From reading these links, can you tell roughly where you’re about to go and what the next page is? If you’ve got a lot of “click here” links and image navigation, you’re likely to have a harder time ranking.
What you are checking for:
Search engines use the “words” (called anchor text) in links to try and determine the content of the linked-to page and tag it with those words. Having pages linked to consistently with “anchor text rich” keywords will increase the chances of that page ranking well within the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You should always take the time to optimise your internal links.

3. The URL memory game

Are urls user-friendly (and therefore Search Engine Friendly)?
Choose 3 pages that you think are important on your website and you’d like your visitor to see. Give yourself 30 seconds a URL and see if you can memorise them. If you can’t, you may need to simplify your URLs.
What you are checking for:
Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs are addresses that contain keywords, rather than query strings.
So a search engine friendly URL might be:
> http://www.yourwebsite.com/internet-dating/free-registration/
A non-search engine friendly URL might be:
> http://www.yourwebsite.com/reg.php?categoryid=24&productid=992&browser=ie8
To be honest, Google is really good at crawling and indexing dynamic “unfriendly” URLs now, however research has shown that “friendly” URLs are more likely to be shared/e-mailed/instant messaged and linked to. They generally cause fewer problems as they are being copied & pasted around the web.
There also appears to still be a slight ranking benefit from optimising your URLs match the targeted keywords.

4. Do important things come first?

Are your important pages just 1 or 2 clicks away?
Hopefully you’ve still got your “important 3 pages” list we made in our last check. Go to your homepage and now navigate to these pages from there while counting how many clicks it takes to get there.
Ideally, your most important pages should only be 1 or 2 clicks away from your homepage.
What you are checking for:
Good information architecture and link structure. Generally how Google and other search engines pass trust and importance via links has to do with the “distance” between pages. Pages “further down” the navigational tree are assumed (well, mathematically calculated) to be less important. There is a decay factor in the amount of link equity passed down in each link level.

5. The double-vision check

Are you duplicating content?
As you navigate up and down your website, is it possible to access the same content twice on a different URL?
Example:
http://www.yourwebsite.com/internet-dating/manchester/registration <- Our registration page
http://www.yourwebsite.com/ online-dating /nottingham/registration <- The same Registration page
In this example, we have found we can access the same registration page, by navigating through our “internet dating” category and our “online dating” category. While this doesn’t present a huge problem for users, it can be troublesome for the search engines.
What you are checking for:
Duplicate content. This means that Google will choose one or the other of your pages to display in the search results.
While not a penalty exactly, it’s wasteful. The result will be that you are wasting link equity on pages that won’t rank and detracting value from the one that does pop-up in the results. Essentially, you’ll still only have one page show up in the results, it will just show up lower.
I hope this information has been helpful, if you have any questions please leave a comment below. Or if you are looking for more detailed SEO Tips please see my other blog posts; 5 SEO Tips, More SEO Tips for your Dating Site or 5 more tips for successful SEO