SEO for Adult Sites – How to Drive Organic Traffic

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges that any website owner encounters is how to drive traffic to their pages. There are a range of solutions for attracting new visitors to a domain, although organic search traffic is without a doubt the best, cheapest and most sustainable way to promote and grow a web property.

This article will look into the science of SEO for the adult niche – a sector with less competition for keywords than others – with an examination of the various trends, tips and tricks that site owners can use to increase their traffic.  

Internal optimization: explained

SEO is a combination of strategies used by a website to gain a higher ranking on search engines like Google, Bing or Yandex. Page one is the ultimate goal for site owners, as the search engines have become adept at being able to offer the most relevant queries in the first batch of results.  

To get into the science of SEO, let’s start with internal optimization, sometimes referred to as “on-site optimization”, which is simply the process of inputting elements that engines will look at to determine the relevance of a website in relation to a search query. If the engine’s algorithm deems these signals to be in line with what a searcher is looking for, it will gain a higher rank.

Internal optimization is a critical part of the SEO process and contributes between 2-35% of a website’s ranking. The remaining are owed to off-site factors.

The main things engines look at are the content present on the website, the type, quality and quantity of links that are pointing to it, as well as the links that point out of that website. There are a few other metrics worth looking into, but these are the most important.

Therefore, in order to make sure that any adult SEO campaign is successful, there should be four key points of focus. They are:

• Page relevance
• Domain authority
• The authority of inbound links
• The relevance of inbound links

Let’s go through these in a bit of detail to make sure everything is clear.

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Page relevance

Page relevance refers to how relevant a page is in relation to the search term that someone wants to rank for.

A few things that search engines look at to determine the relevance of a page are:

• Page title: In order to make sure a page ranks for a specific keyword, be sure that it’s included in the title tag of the page.
• Page description: Similar to page title, the same keyword must also be used in the page description.
• Page content: This is the general body content of the page, and this must also speak about the keyword in question. In other words, it must be the “theme” of the body content. Experts recommend that each piece of content should be at least 500 words as the engines can give preference to longer entries that fully answer a query.
• Image titles: If any images are used on the website or webpage, there is a specific section in the settings of the image that allows someone to enter an “Alt text”. This text must contain the keyword that someone wants to rank for and is very important for adult websites, which typically host a range of media.
• Video titles: Similar to image titles, any videos used on the website or webpage must also carry the keyword in question. Again, this is crucial for adult websites given the content they serve.

Domain authority

The concept of domain authority (DA) simply refers to how authoritative the domain is, or how much authority it commands. Older websites are more likely to have a higher DA than newer websites, which can be the result of constant optimization over a number of years.  

However, several other factors are responsible for determining the DA of a website. These include:

• The number of links pointing to the domain
• The quality of the links pointing to the domain
• Social factors such as traffic from social websites like Facebook and Twitter, engagement from these sites, virility, etc.

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Inbound link authority

The authority of inbound links is used by search engines to determine how important a website is in relation to a specific keyword. This is a crucial step for getting adult SEO right, but so many get it wrong.

Site owners mess up by employing the same blackhat techniques that may have worked a few years ago but won’t cut it with today’s algorithms. Companies can be used to build lots of links in a matter of days and have their customers believe this will be their route to SEO success. With regards building links for your website, quality is much more important than quantity. Generally, the higher the authority of the links, the more powerful and effective they will be in ranking a website.

The relevance of inbound links

Similar to the authority of inbound links, their relevance is also very important.

For instance, if your adult website is about lesbians, and the majority of the links that point to your website are from websites that target another niche, like milf porn, the search engines will consider these to be unrelated. In such cases, the power of such a backlink will be very minimal, and will have little impact on your SEO.

Fortunately you are not required to check each link as it comes in. Four highly recommended tools that you can use for SEO and checking the relevance and authority of your inbound links are:

1. Moz – Very good at establishing link authority
2. Ahrefs – A paid-for tool which is effective at counting links
3. Majestic – A very user-friendly platform
4. SEMrush – Similar to Majestic with a lot of features

The two recommended tools from that list are Moz and Majestic. The latter uses two metrics called Trust Flow and Citation Flow. If you want to know how authoritative a website is, then the metric to look at is Trust Flow. Citation flow is more of a measure of the quantity of links or “citation”.

Moz is the tool that will let you know the DA of a website, but can also do a lot more once you properly get to know its features. It’s why it’s one of the most well-known solutions.

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SEO for adult sites

After recognizing how the system works, site owners can now implement the changes that will propel their pages up the rankings. Let’s look at some of the easy ways of doing this.

Internal linking

Getting started with SEO for your adult website requires a good look at internal linking, which presents one of the best ways of driving SEO in a relatively simple manner.

This practice involves the pointing of links between pages as well as the site itself. By simply including a link to one page within another, the search engine will get an idea of its importance and begin to consider a good rank for it.

Domain optimization

If a site has a focused keyword that it wants to rank for, having this in the domain name itself is a step in the right direction. One trick of the trade is having it form part of a bigger sentence, accompanied by other words, as the engines can look down on sites which look to be playing the system in a blatant manner.

Great content

In today’s age, you can’t rank well without good, relevant content. Search engines are clever enough to know what their users want and content is the best way of answering a query.

To craft this, site owners must focus on unique posts which are easy to read, over 500 words and preferably with a multimedia element (video, images etc). Internal linking is also advised, while posts should be made regularly to deliver fresh insight – another key point of focus for Google and other engines.

Extra tips

Beyond the fundamentals of good SEO for an adult site, there are other things that webmasters can do to set their site apart from the competition. These are still very easy to do and – when combined – could be the difference between good SEO and great SEO. Some of the ‘nice to haves’ include:

Shareability

There are few better and easier ways to build a link than through having the reader share a piece of content. It’s why so many of today’s sites have elements like social sharing buttons that surround their pages. Comments can also act as a signal to Google that users are interested in what is being said.

Sitemap submitting

The sitemap is the index of pages on a website and submitting this to Google can pay off in a number of ways. For example, if a site uploads a new piece of content, Google will know as soon as it’s added and therefore take it into account when assessing its ranking. Sitemap reports also give people insights about the people visiting their pages, which isn’t bad for a free tool.

Optimize the tagline

Another useful hack is to include an important keyword in the title of a site and follow this up with related keywords if possible. Much like with the same advice for the domain, this has brought success to many.

Alt tagging

As aforementioned, if an adult site hosts a large amount of images, it should seek to optimize through these by adding a keyword into the alt tag of each picture. Don’t forget that Google isn’t all text – people still use Google images to find what they need.

Emphasize keywords

Putting a keyword in bold or in a special font is another SEO hack which is easy to do and, again, has brought plenty of people a lot of success

Keep an eye on speed

Anyone searching with a generic keyword and hitting the first 10 sites will notice that each one functions well and without delay. Site speed is a key ranking factor and given the shortening of attention spans and lifted expectations among web users, it pays to get everything loaded as fast as possible to avoid people migrating from the page.

Adult sites generally attract visitors from all over the world, so webmasters should be keeping an eye on where their traffic comes from and even considering having a data center in a key location to aid site speed.

                                    

 Go mobile

Much like site speed, mobile responsiveness is becoming increasingly important as a ranking factor. Audiences on platforms like Facebook are now dominated by smartphone and tablet browsers, while Google has made an evident play towards audiences on the move.

To fit in with Google’s expectations for mobile responsiveness, an adult site must be quick to load on mobile and also feature a good, highly responsive design. Thanks to Google and its ‘mobile friendly’ label, it’s now even easier to spot examples of this when trawling through a page of search results.

Platforms like Themeforest are making it even easier for their customers to become mobile friendly by designing templates with this in mind.

Rookie SEO mistakes to stay away from

We now steer away from best practices and onto worst practices. SEO is effectively a way of playing a system and there are several things that a lot of adult websites do that kills their traffic. Some of them are:

1. Purchasing links from sellers: This is perhaps one of the deadliest “sins” of SEO.  Whether it’s buying links or using any type of blackhat method in the link-building process, there are things that all webmasters should stay away from.
2. Sending too many links to a website in short spaces of time: This is known as link velocity – something that can affect a website’s ranking. The search engines will likely notice when this happens and will penalize it.
3. Favouring quantity over quality: This has previously been touched upon but so important that it’s worth a second mention. Any SEO expert will tell you it’s better to have one link from a high quality website than 50 bad links from bad websites. The stats will show this.
4. Focusing only on do-follow links: Another rookie SEO trait is focusing on building only do-follow links – i.e the ones that are tracked – once they learn how no-follow links do not pass any link juice to their website. This is another mistake that should be avoided. All sites need a natural link profile, which includes a good mixture of do-follow and no-follow links.

Lastly, be sure to stay away from private blog networks (PBNs), no matter how tempting it is to go down that route. PBNs will help a site owner build links within several websites, all of which are under their control. This is considered ‘grey hat’, as it’s supposedly neither black nor whitehat. However, Google now frowns strongly on PBNs and may punish people who use them.

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Final thoughts

Driving organic traffic to an adult site is never easy, but there are so many tweaks and tactics that site owners can use to gain the upper hand and get their domain climbing up the rankings. From submitting a sitemap to simply producing great content, search engines like Google have laid out the ways in which site owners can gain SEO success, which means it’s just a case of filling in the gaps when optimizing.

Of course, these same engines have also laid out what they don’t want to see littering their top results. Blackhat SEO does still exist and it’s likely that someone with great search presence has gained a bit of luck when dabbling with the dark side. What’s clear is that a huge risk is being taken in doing so, which rarely makes it worthwhile.

On the whole, adult SEO is all about fine tweaks, as site owners will use each little step to optimize their pages in a big way.
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