Internet Marketing Techniques in the Online Dating Community

Online dating has become one of the most competitive and profitable sectors of the Internet. Like any other industry, there are those few giants who seem to dominate the field, but there are countless other “little guys” who are making their moves to secure their own chunk of the market. And due to the unique nature of the Internet, a couple companies are starting to find success even without the the monster budgets of the giants. By the simple employment of various Internet marketing techniques, these companies are starting to make waves.

A company can do a lot with a number one search engine ranking, and certain Internet marketing practices can get you there. It's not a simple process, nor is it fast, and Internet marketing “specialists” who tell you otherwise are just as likely to get you banned as they are anything else.

But in the online dating community there's a new website that managed to work its way to the top of the “online dating” and “free online dating” heap. Both of these keyword phrases receive thousands upon thousands of searches every month and are highly desirable and coveted keywords. Into this highly competitive market walks Mingle2.com, a website built and maintained by a single guy who put it together without giving up his regular day job. In a mere 100 days he had managed to get himself to the top of the pile, ranking in the top five, if not the top one or two, for “online” and “free online dating.”

How did he do it? Companies are paying good money for SEO firms to do exactly that, and, generally speaking, it doesn't happen that often. At least not without resorting to some of the famous black hat Internet marketing techniques.

So how did Mingle2 do it? What about OKCupid? They're the other site contending for the top spot on the natural search rankings. Both of these sites have managed to beat the giants like Match.com and e-Harmony for that top spot. The question is, will they be able to maintain their position?

Both Mingle2 and OKCupid have used similar Internet marketing techniques to facilitate their growth. Were any of these techniques “black hat”? Will they be able to maintain their positions or will the giants overtake them again? Did their techniques win them the favor of all the major search engines?

It seems these days that no two search engine marketers can agree on what constitutes the best practices for Internet marketing. There is, of course, some accepted standards. Keyword density, useful content, anchor text, and link recruiting – everyone agrees that these are important, they just don't know how important. And with the search engines continually changing and evolving their algorithms, we may never know. But by examining some of the current practices and trends, we can get an idea.

So what Internet marketing techniques, exactly, did Mingle2 and OKCupid use to gain their rankings? First, they both put the keyword “free online dating” in text links. Lots of text links. But surely Google doesn't like seeing the same link over and over again, you say. And you're right. So we simply get around this by adding a city name after each keyword. Now the keyword is listed 40 to 50 times, but technically it's a different word each time.

Of course, having 40 or 50 keyword occurrences on a homepage doesn't look good. So what do you do? Well, the two answers so far seem to be: hide the list in a div at the bottom of the screen or just fill above the fold with all the information and pictures a visitor will need and then list the geographic specific keywords below the fold. And if the list is on a light blue background, with white text, well... it's still readable.

Are these black hat Internet marketing practices? Not really. Is the number of keyword text links spammy? Kind of. Are the links valid and relative to the site? More or less. The argument could certainly be made that they are useful additions to the site. Call it a case of “spammy validity”, then. It's not wrong... but it doesn't quite feel right, either.

What about those all important links? Both Mingle2 and OKCupid have, in the strictest, technical language, a jillion links each. Okay, maybe not that many, but close. How did they do it? Through an SEO technique that, in recent years, has almost been forgotten. It's the good old fashioned widget. A funny little doohickey (again with the technical lingo) that, for one reason or another, outside websites place on their site and link back to yours. In the olden days this often came in the form of web tools or other items. Both OKCupid and Mingle2 employ the graphic widget. Get on their site, take a test, receive a graphic, post the graphic that shows the test results on your website/blog/MySpace page/etc. It only takes a single widget that is neat enough for a blogger to pick it up, and soon the entire community is posting their own graphics, which, by the way, carry a link back to the original site.

Mingl2 seems to have just this in mind. He offers a number of funny little quizzes – everything from rating your Geek Level to percent chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse. Neat, yes? Yes. Anything to do with dating? Well, maybe the zombie thing, but otherwise, no. And why do blogs like them so much? Because one of the quizzes revolves around “How addicted to blogging am I?” It would only take a single, fairly popular blogger to put that one on his or her site before the entire community was doing the same. And then the jillions of links come rolling in.

So now they've got keyword density, lots of anchor text, and an impressive array of inbound, one-way links. Sounds pretty good. Now, do these Internet marketing techniques work across the board? Not necessarily. Mingle2 and OKCupid rate incredibly well on Google, but mediocre at best for MSN and Yahoo (at least at the time of this writing). And the same goes for results on the metasearch engines.

For right now these sites have apparently found a way to work within Google's algorithm, but will it last? And how did it work so well in the first place? Aren't unrelated links supposed to be worth a lot less? Aren't relative links the goal of Internet marketing? And links from widgets aren't exactly the most permanent of institutions. On the other hand, blogs seem to be Google's babies, these days. Could it be that a link from a blog is worth more than a related link?

The toughest part is that it could all change tomorrow. Something that is validly spammy one day, could just be regular spam the next. The online dating community is intensely competitive and the fight for high rankings will continue, and marketers in the online dating industry will continue to push to find out the best way to work with the search engines and come out on top of the heap.

Andy Eliason is a writer at Main10, an Internet marketing and development company. If you'd like to learn more about Internet Marketing or any of their other services, please see their website.