What are keywords?

When a user conducts a search through a search engine, they use words or phrases to find what they are looking for. These words or phrases are what we consider keywords. For example, a user might type in “lingerie” or “sexy lingerie” when conducting their search for lingerie. The keywords here are either “lingerie” or “sexy lingerie”. Notice that a keyword can consist of more than one word so from our previous example, “sexy lingerie” is actually considered a single keyword. By targeting a keyword, you are putting your efforts into having a search engine return your website as a relevant search result for a given keyword. Selecting the right keyword(s) to target is paramount in building a successful online business.

Why is it important to target keywords?

When a search engine indexes your website, it scans your pages (among other things) for keywords in an effort to determine the topic of your website/pages. Without a strong focus on any keywords, you leave it to the search engine to decide what information on your pages is important and what isn’t. That’s why it’s so important to influence the outcome of this decision by “helping” the search engine find and pick the right keywords that describe your content. And by doing so, your turnkey adult website has a better chance of being returned as a relevant search result for the targeted keyword than one that hasn’t put in the same effort.

Before you go ahead and start stuffing your pages with keywords, it’s important to understand that you cannot rank high for every single keyword that you select. The web is huge and there are millions of sites competing for the same keywords which can make it very difficult to rank high for competitive keywords. Instead, you should focus your efforts on targeting a few keywords that are less competitive but still provide a decent amount of traffic. Not only will this make your efforts feasible, you’ll get to see results a lot quicker.

Selecting the right keywords

Okay, so you’re ready to get going but how do you select the right keywords to target for your turnkey adult website? This is going to require some research on your end to determine and there are tools and services available to help you make this decision. You can use tools like the Google Keyword Tool to determine exactly how many people actually search for a given keyword per month to find out if it’s worth targeting. The important thing to remember here is that it’s better to target a niche keyword that has fewer searches per month (but still enough to sustain a profitable business) than a keyword that has a lot of searches per month and way too much competition. The exact number of searches per month that is acceptable is something that you’ll have to determine for yourself but generally any keyword that has anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand searches per month is an ideal target. Why? Because there is less competition for these keywords and your chances of obtaining a first page ranking is much more likely than it would be for a keyword with heavy competition. Plus, a few hundred to a few thousand interested buyers to your website per month is still very appealing!

I’m going to run through an example of selecting a keyword in this post so I’ll be using our lingerie shop as a visual aid to picking out a keyword worth targeting. The obvious keywords here would be “lingerie” or “sexy lingerie” but if we look at the level of competition for these keywords it quickly becomes apparent that this would be a futile effort for a small start-up or part-time business. Instead, we need to focus on something with less competition and something that we can achieve in a much shorter period of time and with a smaller budget. So lets try a different keyword that is more specific or targeted to a niche market. We’ll begin with Google’s Keyword Tool and enter a few keywords that come to mind. The best part about this tool is that it’ll provide us with related search terms so that we can get some ideas of what people are searching for.

1. Go to the Google Keyword Tool

2. Under “Descriptive words or phrases” we’ll be adding some keywords that I’ve come up with that describe our lingerie business. I’ll be using the keywords “sexy lingerie”, “erotic lingerie”, “romantic lingerie” and “sexy adult lingerie”. Be sure to enter only one keyword/phrase per line and make sure the appropriate region that you wish to target is selected. If you’re targeting everyone, leave the region setting as-is, Google’s tool will provide global keyword results in addition to that of your selected region. Now, click on “Get keyword ideas” to have Google’s tool generate a list of related keywords along with their monthly search volume.

   

   Google Keyword Tool

3. Analyze the list of keywords returned by Google’s keyword tool. Remember, keywords with a large monthly search volume will be accompanied by fierce competition. We want to find something that still has a valuable monthly search volume for our turnkey adult website but at the same time doesn’t carry a high level of competition. When selecting a keyword, I usually target something that has 10,000 or less searches per month. I normally prefer something between 1000-10000 searches per month because getting to the top for such a keyword can prove to be much more easier and rewarding.

   Lets have a look at our results. It looks like I lucked out, two out of four of my keywords have a reasonable monthly search volume both locally and globally. Forget about “sexy lingerie” and “erotic lingerie”, based on the monthly search volume of those keywords it looks like there’s going to be way too much competition. I’m also not liking any of the other suggestions provided by Google’s tool so I’m going to pass up on those (but be sure to have a look at those when you’re conducting your own searches). So far, “romantic lingerie” and “sexy adult lingerie” look like the clear winners. I’m leaning towards “sexy adult lingerie” but lets hold off on making that decision right now as we still have a little research to do.

   

   Google Keyword Tool

4. The next thing we want to do is enter our selected keywords into Google so that we can analyze the results that are returned. We do this to ensure that our keyword is returning the results that we’re expecting (i.e. other lingerie shops or competing businesses). If it isn’t, then it’s likely that we haven’t selected a good keyword to target.

   Lets enter both of our keywords into Google separately. Remember, when entering the keyword into Google you should enclose it with quotation marks to tell Google that we’re looking for that exact term. If we don’t enclose our keyword in quotes, Google will treat each word in our keyword as a separate keyword which may skew our results.

   

   Searching for an exact match in Google

   This will also give us an idea of how many results are returned for our keyword. While this doesn’t mean that each of the websites returned is a competitor, it does show the number of results that we’ll have to overcome.

   

   Google results for exact match search

   After conducting a search for both of my keywords on Google, I’m happy with the results that I’m seeing. Both keywords are returning results for competing lingerie businesses. I’ve decided to go ahead with the keyword “sexy adult lingerie” for the purposes of this tutorial. In reality, you might decide to target both keywords or do additional research to make your final decision.

5. The next thing we want to determine is the direct competition for our selected keyword. What I mean by this is businesses considered to be actively targeting our keyword. Remember, this isn’t an exact science and others may have different views or ways of measuring direct competition so feel free to use whatever techniques you feel comfortable with. We’ll consider a website that has our keyword (verbatim) within the title tag, as an anchor (hyperlink) and somewhere within their page to be a direct competitor for the keyword. We can determine this by using Google search operators with our keyword. Enter the following line into Google for our selected keyword to determine how much direct competition we have:

   intext:”sexy adult lingerie” inanchor:”sexy adult lingerie” intitle:”sexy adult lingerie”

   From our results, we can see we have a total of 6 direct competitors for our keyword based on our definition of a direct competitor. This is excellent and I’m happy with the results. I’ve made the final decision to use “sexy adult lingerie” as the keyword that I plan to actively target.

   

From here you’ll need to select a page to which you wish to link this keyword. What I mean by this is determining which page of our website we want a visitor to be sent to when they search for our selected keyword. If you’re just starting out, this should almost always be your homepage. You’ll want to begin using your keyword in a variety of ways on your homepage and use your keyword in the form of anchor links on other pages of your website which link back to your homepage. You’ll also want to try getting links to your homepage from external websites using your keyword (backlinks). For more information on backlinks, you should view our tutorial on creating backlinks for your turnkey adult website.

Be aware that simply loading your pages with this keyword repetitively isn’t going to get you the results that you want. You need to use the keyword legitimately where applicable without it looking like keyword spam. Start off by putting the keyword in the title and meta tags of your homepage. Place it in a few location on your homepage as well and try linking back to your homepage using your keyword from other pages contained within your website. After that, start your work on creating backlinks. Most importantly, be patient because SEO is a slow process which takes time. If you create too many backlinks in too short a period of time, you’ll likely end up getting penalized for it by the major search engines. If done correctly, you can expect to see some results for your turnkey adult website within the first 3-4 months.

Note: This post is specific to Google but much of your efforts here will effect all other major search engines.

Blogging can be the answer to obtaining the visitors that you need to make your business profitable. Blogs are a cost-effective method of reaching more potential customers in a manner that may not seem obvious until you fully understand it.

What is a blog?

In case you don’t already know, here’s the definition of a blog straight from Wikipedia:

A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

How can a blog help you attract more visitors for your adult website business?

Blogs naturally tend to attract a lot of search engine traffic. As a result, adult website businesses that maintain a blog tend to receive more visitors to their main website than they otherwise would receive through search engines alone. Blogs are also an excellent method to help you target keywords which can affect your search engine rankings. Why?

• A blog can easily add to the page count of your website and provide additional content for search engines to consume. This increases your searchable content and increases the potential of your website or blog being returned in more search results. This is especially true if your blog posts make good use of keywords that you intend to target.
• Blogs can help you grow your inbound links or backlinks (i.e. other websites linking to your website) which can help you increase your pagerank and performance in search engines. This might occur if someone finds one or more of your blog entries useful and decides to provide a link to that entry from their own blog or website.
• A blog can provide your business with a space to post useful/helpful or even off-topic information that might otherwise not be appropriate for your main website. Again, this information can be consumed by search engines with the potential of driving visitors via related search queries.

Anyone looking to increase their visitor count and overall search engine performance should seriously consider blogging as a possible solution. While a blog will add to your weekly workload, the benefits are much too important to pass by. Have a look at our adult blog hosting package if you’re interested in obtaining a blog for your adult website business. You’ll receive a fully operational blog linked with your adult website completely setup and ready-to-go. And because we’re an adult business, you’re free to post explicit adult content without breaching any terms of service as you would with non-adult blogging services.

A blog can be added to your website at anytime but we recommend getting one started early on so that your website can benefit from the added potential of search engine traffic.

In this post we will be taking a look at backlinks. Without question, backlinks are one of the most important aspects of SEO success. What are backlinks? It’s just a fancy word for incoming links from external websites (i.e. websites that are not owned by you) that point to your website. The idea behind backlinks is that a website with a lot of incoming links must be providing something useful and as a result should be treated as more relevant in search results. However, keep in mind that the quality of these backlinks also plays a significant role in determining your websites pagerank. The more quality backlinks that your website has, the better the possibility of your site appearing higher up in search results. And by quality backlinks we mean those coming from websites with a high pagerank and especially those coming from websites with a similar topic. But don’t completely dismiss backlinks from websites with a lower pagerank–they can still help you improve your pagerank. And in fact, in an adult business, this is more a reality since obtaining links from websites with a high pagerank can be quite difficult.

In short, backlinks are an important part of SEO for your adult business which will require time and effort to build. But rest assured that your efforts will pay off when you climb above your competitors in search results for your targeted keywords.

How do I get backlinks?

Get yourself listed in directories and other business oriented websites that deal with similar content and topics as your website. Make links with other businesses if possible and have then link to your website using one of the keywords that you’re targeting. Use social networking to create additional links. And last but not least, write articles and blog entries using keywords that you’re targeting.

You should avoid building backlinks on spam sites or sites that contain illegal content, or by using services that sell links in bulk, or by using link exchanges. These are all practices that are frowned upon by search engines and may have a negative effect on your pagerank.

To start building backlinks, you can use your favorite search engine to start looking for blogs, forums and directories in which you can start posting comments or articles. It’s best to build a list of potential backlink partners before getting started. Visit only a handful of websites per day (10-15) and post comments, articles or replies with backlinks to your website. The reason for limiting the number of backlinks that you create per day is because a lot of backlinks in a very short period of time may look a little suspicious. This could hinder your pagerank or potential pagerank if viewed as suspicious by search engines. You can also search the web for “backlink builder” tools that can help you find valid sources for building your backlinks.

When posting content, comments, articles or replies be sure to make them relevant to the topic at hand. The way in which you incorporate your backlink is up to you so use your best judgment. As previously mentioned, the safest and easiest way is to include your backlink is in a signature–if possible.

Getting your website listed in directories

It is important to get your website listed in directories with high pagerank. Two of the most important are DMOZ and Yahoo. However, depending on the content of your website, this may or may not be applicable to you. For example, an adult toy or lingerie shop are ideal candidates for inclusion into these directories while websites dealing with pornography may not be so ideal. Be sure to look for other adult oriented directories but make sure you understand the difference between a directory and a link exchange prior to doing so.

Remember, building backlinks is a time consuming process that can take months to complete but it is an invaluable tool for getting your website noticed. If you’re serious about building your turnkey adult business and making it a success, be sure to use the information in this post to your advantage. And don’t be afraid to do your own research! Just be sure to verify your info with a number of different sources before taking any steps. It’s much more difficult to undo damage done by following incorrect information than it is to prevent it.

Before you go out and purchase a turnkey adult website from just any provider, make sure that you ask them for a demo website. Then, put the homepage and a few random pages through the W3C validator at http://validator.w3.org/. The W3C validator is a simple method for checking the compliance level of a website and the quality of their coding. A website that passes validation checks will have zero errors and warnings and will display a successful validation message as shown below.

Successful W3C Markup Validation

At Adult Turnkey Depot, we ensure that any of our turnkey adult websites that are coded in-house meet the strictest HTML standards compliance and pass W3C markup validation without a single error. This helps us ensure that all of your visitors receive a consistent shopping experience and that your marketing efforts do not go to waste.