SEO For a paysite

[sexysmokingsirens]

Yes, I have read the excellent GFY educational series about SEO and am more than passingly familiar with it.

It seems to me and this is sort of the genesis of my question that trying to do SEO on an actual paysite is a losing proposition since most of the places where you'd have keywords, meta, etc. is inside the members area (which I don't think Google/searchbots can or will crawl). With only a handful of external pages (landing, tour, join), it just doesn't seem that you could rank very well, just not enough opportunities. I know that is sort of the purpose of a transparent tour that some sites are using. Even so. Am I correct in all of this, I guess that's my first question: it is even possible to rank an actual paysite anymore?

Which I'm guessing is why the idea of building a blog, etc. to do the actual SEO and drive traffic is a more current model. In that vein should a blog be actually part of the paysite (which might go towards helping build SEO for it) or should it be separate in an attempt to get itself ranked and then drive traffic to the paysite (via banners or links or what not). For example, I note that Brazzers has several free 'blogs' which are basically just site updates. You go to the blog, watch the clipo, see some pics and hopefully that gets someone to click over to the paysite.

Am I missing anything above?

Thanks!

[fonsolo]

Excellent question. I also am curious!

[Tent Pitcher]

These days it is really better to have the full package...You've got to think that even if you are optimizing your pay site, you are still competing against at least thousands of others who are doing the exact same thing. Search engines aren't stupid anymore, they want relevant, meaningful content and they will reward you for it. If all you are bringing is the same as everyone else, you will start at the back of that herd every time.

A lot of times people look at it as a chore - having to write a blog, come up with content, etc. But you've got to look at it objectively - the search engines are there to give the most pertinent content to their users and let's face it, there is a lot of adult content out there. these days you really have to go the extra mile if you want to set yourself apart.

[GARY LEE]

You are exactly right and have brought up a problem that paysite owners like myself face everyday.
Don't give up on the SEO issue just because you only have a few pages out there and 99% of your site is behind the credit card. Things you can do include get more pages out there. I took my sites standard 6 free pages and boosted them to 20. Make sure EVERY picture has a title and ALT tag attached and that they include lots of your keywords. Make sure on these free pages that you include lots of text with keyword rich h1, h2, etc. headers. Make sure you bold out your keywords in this text as well. Remember that customers like pictures and robots like text, make sure you have plenty of both.
Offsite make sure every porn related site you can find points a do-follow link to your site. And don't forget the social sites like twitter and facebook (yuk) are talking about your site.
Enough for today this should give you a good start on what to work on.

[sexysmokingsirens]

Originally Posted by GARY LEE

You are exactly right and have brought up a problem that paysite owners like myself face everyday.
Don't give up on the SEO issue just because you only have a few pages out there and 99% of your site is behind the credit card. Things you can do include get more pages out there. I took my sites standard 6 free pages and boosted them to 20. Make sure EVERY picture has a title and ALT tag attached and that they include lots of your keywords. Make sure on these free pages that you include lots of text with keyword rich h1, h2, etc. headers. Make sure you bold out your keywords in this text as well. Remember that customers like pictures and robots like text, make sure you have plenty of both.
Offsite make sure every porn related site you can find points a do-follow link to your site. And don't forget the social sites like twitter and facebook (yuk) are talking about your site.
Enough for today this should give you a good start on what to work on.

So if you don't mind sharing a 'secret', what free pages did you develop on-site that you listed above? That is, you said you took the sites standard 6 free pages and boosted that to 20.

Unfortunately, my CMS platform (elevated X) has no way of allowing customers to alter alt tags which is a huge drawback.

Thank you.

[GARY LEE]

If you look at my site I'm referring to (cuntrybabes.com) you'll see I had my standard 6 buttons which were home through friends. I added a couple buttons like FAQ and contact. But while your on the home page if you'll scroll down you'll find links to other pages. I simply took my free tour of girls which I try to keep a couple hundred on there and organized them into groups like blonde, brunette, redhead, barely legal, etc. Each of these pages have pics of that category but for the search engines there is also text, titles, alt tags, blah, blah, blah.
Keep trying to think of ways to break your site into more pages before the credit card and it will help your SEO greatly.
Also I'm glad you told me about elevated x. I'm in the process of the conversion and am becoming more and more disillusioned with the whole gig. I know however we will find a way to put alt tags with the pictures as I can't imagine why they would not allow that. Maybe AJ will read this and contact you with how you can do it. They do seem to be pretty accommodating.
Good luck with your site.

[AJHall]

This is the first time I've had a customer say they felt that a lack of alt tags posed a problem. The truth is that very few site owners we come across want to take the time to add a specific alt tag to every image on their site. If this becomes a more common request we will consider adding it.

Our own site elevatedx.com ranks #1 for at least 2 competitive CMS related search terms and is in the top 3 for a few others and we have no alt tags. We have lots of customers ranked top 5 in various niches, some of them extremely competitive. Currently we've had no indication that a well optimized site/page is penalized due to an absence of alt tags.

The Elevated X adult CMS system has SEO options for every content page, model page and news/blog update page to have a custom URL as well as custom Meta Description and Keywords. The Title of the page (which can also be carried over to a h1 tag for SEO) can also be customized for every content/model/blog page. Standard in the latest version of the CMS, each of these pages also has a text description field that can be edited as needed and peppered with keyword tags. The standard page setup of our latest design templates have hotlinked lists of models appearing in each update as well as category or niche keyword tags for every content update or blog entry so sites span more pages and more pages of a site are crawled by search engines.

My suggestion is to consider using our transparent tour setup which is available for free as a standard part of the latest CMS version and allows you to mirror the member's area and have hundreds or thousands of pages indexed by search engines. This along with taking advantage of our customer URL and meta data fields and writing solid copy on all your pages should go a long way to improve your search rankings.

Feel free to email or call me if you want more info on how to set this up.

AJ

[GARY LEE]

Thanx for the tip AJ about your transparent tour setup. When we get closer to going live I will have my guy I have doing that check out that option.
I did want to say something about your SEO opinion though. It talked about your own site ranking well on the SERPS and I congratulate you for that. Just remember that as a backend database for adult companies you only have about a dozen real competitors so it's easy for you to rank for that with no SEO required. If I wanted to rank for "Paso Robles porn" I have that honor already because I am the only porn company in Paso Robles, California and I don't need SEO for that. However, if I wanted to rank for "porn" then that is a different story because I have millions of competitors and I would need a ton of SEO to even get on a google search page in the triple digits of which nobody would ever see.
Us porn paysite webmasters have the decked stacked against us already and one of those Aces we have is that so much of our pages is pictures and we can use keywords in our title and alt tags. Please help out and remember that. Remember we're all here to make a buck just like yourself.
Congrats again for being on the top in the SERPS, I wish I was there as well.

[AJHall]

Trust me, we have serious competitors just like you do and they want the top spot too. Our results were just an example. At one time we were not #1 or even in the top 5 for several terms. It took some work - which incidentally did not include use of alt tags. In my reply I did mentioned that we have customers with top rankings for very competitive niches who are not using alt tags.

I do agree with you that every little bit helps but the point of my post was that alt tags are not going to be the make or break factor for topping other sites in the rankings.

If we see enough of a need for this among our CMS customers we will definitely look into adding alt tag options to our next CMS version update.

AJ

[sexysmokingsirens]

Originally Posted by GARY LEE

If you look at my site I'm referring to (cuntrybabes.com) you'll see I had my standard 6 buttons which were home through friends. I added a couple buttons like FAQ and contact. But while your on the home page if you'll scroll down you'll find links to other pages. I simply took my free tour of girls which I try to keep a couple hundred on there and organized them into groups like blonde, brunette, redhead, barely legal, etc. Each of these pages have pics of that category but for the search engines there is also text, titles, alt tags, blah, blah, blah.
Keep trying to think of ways to break your site into more pages before the credit card and it will help your SEO greatly.
Also I'm glad you told me about elevated x. I'm in the process of the conversion and am becoming more and more disillusioned with the whole gig. I know however we will find a way to put alt tags with the pictures as I can't imagine why they would not allow that. Maybe AJ will read this and contact you with how you can do it. They do seem to be pretty accommodating.
Good luck with your site.

Thank you for the response, Gary. I looked at your site and see what you did and it makes sense. I see that AJ responded below regarding alt tags so I won't address it further.

One followup question, do you think that putting a blog on the site itself hurts or helps? i could see it being another way to generate SEO in non-protected pages. It's updatable (my understanding is that Panda does like to see sites that update fairly consistently), etc. Iknow that elevated X has a basic blog interface but I was thinking of even the possibility of putting a full wordpress type of blog (which makes SEO trivial with some of the plugs) on the site itself.

Or is it better to have the blog separate on it's own domain, get that ranked and use that to try to drive traffic?

I'm guessing there's no 'right' answer here but I'd be curious what you thought about it.

Thanks!

[sexysmokingsirens]

Originally Posted by AJHall

Trust me, we have serious competitors just like you do and they want the top spot too. Our results were just an example. At one time we were not #1 or even in the top 5 for several terms. It took some work - which incidentally did not include use of alt tags. In my reply I did mentioned that we have customers with top rankings for very competitive niches who are not using alt tags.

I do agree with you that every little bit helps but the point of my post was that alt tags are not going to be the make or break factor for topping other sites in the rankings.

If we see enough of a need for this among our CMS customers we will definitely look into adding alt tag options to our next CMS version update.

AJ

Hey AJ, good to see you posting here. I had actually asked John about the alt tag issue, it wasn't so much a complaint as just a thought when I started thinking more about the SEO issue.

My understanding of the google algorithm is that alt tags count but not that heavily. Clearly if they were crucial more sites would be worrying about it. It was just one of those thoughts.

Thanks!

[GARY LEE]

Originally Posted by sexysmokingsirens

Thank you for the response, Gary. I looked at your site and see what you did and it makes sense. I see that AJ responded below regarding alt tags so I won't address it further.

One followup question, do you think that putting a blog on the site itself hurts or helps? i could see it being another way to generate SEO in non-protected pages. It's updatable (my understanding is that Panda does like to see sites that update fairly consistently), etc. Iknow that elevated X has a basic blog interface but I was thinking of even the possibility of putting a full wordpress type of blog (which makes SEO trivial with some of the plugs) on the site itself.

Or is it better to have the blog separate on it's own domain, get that ranked and use that to try to drive traffic?

I'm guessing there's no 'right' answer here but I'd be curious what you thought about it.

Thanks!

I totally agree on the idea of a blog. It would help greatly and after I go through my elevatedx conversion I will be doing the same. Our SEO company has about 50 blogs going out there right now and we have multiple links coming off them on a regular basis. They also feed link juice to our sites by linking to our social sites which in turn link to our money sites such as the one that I directed you to.
I would suggest doing a blog on your free side of the credit card so it will include not only members but lookie-loos as well. I think your on the right track and I wish you lots of big bucks in the future.
Good luck and Merry Xmas.

[AJHall]

Originally Posted by sexysmokingsirens

Hey AJ, good to see you posting here. I had actually asked John about the alt tag issue, it wasn't so much a complaint as just a thought when I started thinking more about the SEO issue.

My understanding of the google algorithm is that alt tags count but not that heavily. Clearly if they were crucial more sites would be worrying about it. It was just one of those thoughts.

Thanks!

Yep, exactly. It doesn't make a big enough impact or we would add it - and when it does, trust that we will add it quickly ;)

I agree with Gary 100% on public blogs and external pages. I would build them and not just build one but lots of them on different domains, different servers with different hosts, etc. so you cast a larger web of links and cross promotion.

You can use your Elevated X CMS to build landings and feeder sites and have links leading to them from various sources (including Adwords) and have them lead to your main pay site or a shared join page.

Email me if you want more info and ideas on doing this.

AJ

[sexysmokingsirens]

Thanks, AJ. For what it's worth, Adwords does not seem to be accepting accounts linking directly to adult content. At least that's what i was told when I attempted to monetize my youtube channel with an adsense campaign.

[AJHall]

Originally Posted by sexysmokingsirens

Thanks, AJ. For what it's worth, Adwords does not seem to be accepting accounts linking directly to adult content. At least that's what i was told when I attempted to monetize my youtube channel with an adsense campaign.

Try calling them and have them clarify their guidelines and see if there's any way you can get around it e.g. use blog links, articles, etc. You may still be able to use it as part of a traffic funnel if you can stay within their terms creatively.