*This blog post is part of an ongoing series on how to use search engine optimization practices to rank your site better in google search results. It’s also based on the “SEO Crash Course sheet that’s been privately shared.*

Hi there! Chances are you’re here because you googled “SEO for escorts” or “web design for escorts.” You may also be here to learn more about the yayfosta hashtag and it’s implementation. Don’t fret- more posts about that will be on the way.

I’m writing this introduction to SEO for escorts because it’s apparent and clear that in order for the yayfosta hashtag to be used effectively, some education about basic SEO concepts needs to happen. We as escorts are losing advertising platforms, getting banned from platforms, and these platforms are losing functionality and don’t offer the same return on investment. Search engine optimization costs nothing, but does take time, so you your return on time investment might be rough to start with. But for those of us who can’t afford to hire an expert or simply want to DIY it, I’m here to help.

A little something about search engine optimization: it’s really like a black art, and try as they may, search engine optimization experts know quite a bit about how search engines (particularly Google) catalog sites, but the algorithm changes sometimes 2-3x daily. It can be kind of danuting to keep up. 

That being said, the topics outlined below should help you get a head start on getting your keywords, content, and google indexing together, and that stuff is the foundation for any further SEO you’ll do in the future.

Why SEO for Escorts often Fails:

Overall, there are several key issues as to why SEO for escorts can. The most common issues I see when doing website audits are these, and if you are writing your own content, you’re going to want to keep these things in mind:

Lack of SEO strategy

You have to have an SEO strategy. What are you trying to achieve with your SEO? Setbacks to achieving these goals include:

Thin content: Google wants to give users the most pertinent results to their searches. If your content isn’t better than the current first-page results for your chosen set of keywords, then you’ll need to adjust your content in order to get onto that coveted first page.

Image-based content: Search engines aren’t yet ready to understand images. Avoid adding text on your images, Google won’t be able to comprehend or index that content. This is why titles, attributes, and alt attributes for photos are so important on websites for our industry. Our websites are generally very image heavy, and not having your images in order can severely set back your ranking.

Poor on-page optimization:  Folks, markers like “header 1,” “header 2,” aren’t really for aesthetic purposed. Those markers are there to tell Google what part of your website it’s reading and how important that phrase/area is in the overall hierarchy of your website’s content. Using these incorrectly confuses Google. Also, your URL slugs (the part that comes after the main website domain name, ie (blackashconsulting.com/this-is-the-url-slug-area) need to make sense for the content covered on that page. Your slugs should also contain the keywords or keyword phrase you’re utilizing for that page, but more on keywords later.

Lack of keyword research: These are the words people actually type into the search bar when searching for things online, and this one is HUGE. What do you want your content to rank for? Ideally you should find keywords with low competition and decent volumes of traffic to optimize your pages for. The more specific your keywording, the better your ranking will be. But really, you need to THINK LIKE A CLIENT when choosing keywords and keyword phrases. 

People generally search geographically, so you’ll need to keep that in mind when listing keywords for yourself. For example, if you are a blonde in Atlanta, you’ll want to have “blonde Atlanta escort” as a keyword phrase in your SEO section and in the body of your website text. Here’s an in-text example: “if you’re looking for a blonde, stacked escort in Atlanta, you’ve come to the right place!”

To make keywords and SEO work, you have to think like a client. You have to actively go through the motions that a client would take in order to find you, and build your SEO plan around that. You can find the keywords that people are using to find you already as a place to start if you’re unsure of what keywords to use. You can do this by navigating to your google analytics account, clicking on “acquisition” in the left-side menu, clicking on “search console” and then clicking on “queries.” unfortunately, google no longer tells you a large percentage of your search queries, but this is most definitely a start.

Beware of keyword loading. Google does dock you significantly in rankings if you do this. An example of this is listing keywords and keyword phrases in the footer of your website. Google Penguin is an active algorithm that goes through and penalizes websites that break google’s webmaster guidelines. You can learn more about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin

For help with keywords, check out the following: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/

Bad competition assessment: How commonly used are your keywords? What’s your niche? Is there a lot of competition in your niche? If so, you’re going to have to spend a lot more on SEO.

Here’s a basic checklist to make sure your SEO is ready to go:

• Sign up for Google Analytics and Google Search Console, then index and crawl your site: Google is nothing more than a super fancy search program, and if it isn’t told that your website is available to be searched for, Google won’t return it when someone searches for you or keywords pertaining to you. You have to send up a signal to Google so that it pays attention to your website- this is why it’s important to submit your sitemap through google webmaster tools and have google fetch and crawl your site and it’s aliases. When you submit your site index and and tell google to fetch and crawl your site, Google then catalogs your website based on keywords it finds, along with something else called structured data/schema markup (this will be covered in another post). Once someone queries a search that utilizes some or all of your keywords, Google shows your website in the results based on how well your website matches the search.

• Make sure each page or blog entry on your website targets one primary, and 1-2 secondary keywords or keyword phrases.

• Include the targeted keywords in your content: both in headings and text

• Make sure the title tag and the meta-description contain the primary keyword

• The URL of your page should display the primary keyword (e.g. www.mysite.com/my-keyword). IF YOU CHANGE YOUR URL SLUG YOU HAVE TO DO A PERMANENT 301 REDIRECT. Depending on your website format, there will be different ways to do this. Google your website platform + 301 redirect.

• When possible, add the keywords in the alt text of your images

• Make sure one of the images’ filename contains the primary keyword (e.g. my-keyword-image.png)

• Double check that your pages are set to be indexed by Google.

Website Loading Speed and other Backend Tech

Slow website loading times can absolutely mess with your rankings. Here are ways to improve your uptime speeds:

• Resize the images to the correct dimensions; you don’t need big images if they will be displayed in small size. Mobile officially outranks desktop/laptop for website access, so you need a mobile-optimized site.

• Optimize your images for the web, use TinyPng

• Broken links upset Google, so make sure you don’t have any. Use http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ to find them.

• Link between your pages when possible, this will make it easy for search engines to discover new content.

• Create a sitemap for your website. Submit it to Google Search Console. Wix and Squarespace have this built in. For WordPress, you’ll need a plugin like Yoast or Google sitemaps.

• Submit your site to be indexed by Google. It’s been estimated that it can take 4 days to 4 weeks for Google to index a site.

SEO Guides for WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace

Ultimately, content is the most important thing when it comes to dealing with SEO, so any website can be optimized.

The following article is specifically for Yoast, the SEO program that’s utilized in WordPress website builds. However, the principles are the same across website platforms.

https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/

Squarespace has its own SEO section, and filling that out accordingly helps with your placement significantly. These articles are incredibly helpful if you are attempting to update SEO on a Squarespace site:

http://searchtides.com/squarespace-seo/

https://www.stylefactoryproductions.com/blog/squarespace-seo

Here are some guides to help you improve your SEO with Wix. You may also want to consider purchasing add-on services and integrating them into your site.

https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/blog/wix-seo/

Other Concepts to Enhance Rankings:

Blogging– while clients may or may not read your blog, Google certainly does, and will increase your rankings for having a regularly updated one. Google favors websites that are frequently updated, and blog posts count as website updates. Not to mention, you can use the in-body text of the blog as well as  tags and categories to sneak in keywords without keyword loading.

Updating your website– The more you update your website, the better. Changing out photos, editing text, changing background colors, whatever. Update your website. Whenever you do major overhauls, you should re-index and re-crawl your website with Google so that it knows your site has been updated. Google will do this on its own, but doing it yourself is faster. Google is known for taking its sweet time with reindexing updated websites.

Linkbacks– Google LOVES linkbacks to other high-quality websites with external links as well. So make sure to link to your friends, any sites that link to you (like Eros, Slixa, Twitter, basically any site that has your web address on it) and make sure your friends link back to you as well. Lots of folks accomplish this through the use of a “friends” page, or through banners for ad sites.

Photo Descriptions: Adding descriptions to your photos,both in headers and in galleries (or anywhere on your site) will give Google additional information to crawl and also help with your site rankings.

That concludes the basics! Next I’ll be discussing structured data/schema markup and how you can use this to rank better.

Happy optimizing!

Erin