Search Engine Optimization

The Allied Network, Ontario’s leading dating service, has been matching single people for more than 16 years. Its members are serious about meeting the right person for a long term relationship and The Allied Network has met that need with excellent success. Thousands of its members have become involved in long term relationships or marriages through The Allied Network’s dating service. The Allied Network believes that its personalized approach to matching is the key to its success. Allied Network members go through a personal interview where a consultant learns about their likes, dislikes, goals and values. Identification is also checked so there is no possibility of misrepresentation which frequently occurs on internet websites.

With over 19,000 members, The Allied Network believes they have someone for everyone. Members at The Allied Network range from young adults who have never been married to people in their thirties, forties and fifties who are divorced and looking for a way to get back into the dating scene. The Allied Network also has many members in their sixties, seventies and eighties who are divorced and widowed and looking for a comfortable way to meet someone special. The Allied Network works personally and confidentially with all of its members to find the right person, making the process of finding someone special fun and enjoyable. If you are interested in meeting the right person call The Allied Network at 1-877-278-8815 or visit www.thealliednetwork.com

Index is the most important part of a website.

• Index appears in search results for main keywords.
• Visitors check index upon landing on your website.
• It’s the face of a website.

The Use of Index

Homepage is a top level page. It must:

• Be search friendly
• Persuade users they’re in the right place
• Tell users why we’re better then them.
• Entice users to explore deeper pages that do actual selling.

SEO - Inbound links, keywords in the title, H tags and text copy are crucial. Learn more about SEO.

Persuading users they’re in the right place – fortunately for websites, users look for exact keywords they used to search, on the pages they land on. So if you rank well on search, you usually have appropriate keywords throughout your index page.

Enticing users to explore deeper pages - achieved with:

• Navigation. Offering relevant choice and information about products and services.
• Snippets of pages. Links to the pages with short benefit packed description of the pages. Snippets are designed to pull in readers to the pages that do the selling or lead to other pages that do. Snippets can be images, or text descriptions
• Links within the copy. Index pages have short copywritings. Links within text can entice readers to explore more.
• Choice of options. This usually takes most real estate and leads users to the appropriate pages. It usually used in large retail websites(overstock.com), mortgage sites(quicken loans) and large corporate portals (PriceWaterhouseCoopers). Choices can take different forms: bulleted links, CSS drop down, database content, and formatted snippets of pages. The point is to lead users to pages of their interest.

A pristine use of the index page is demonstrated by Quicken Loans and WebEx.

Quicken Loans

Right in the center of the page, Quicken put 3 reasons why they’re superior to other providers. They also put a call to action for the shoppers who are ready for business. On the top, we can clearly see 4 main categories of mortgages, with options to calculate and learn more about each mortgage. On the right there’s the mortgage calculator. And on the bottom there’s more stuff to drill into. As a mortgage shopper, I can quickly locate what I need and get to the right page.

WebEx

WebEx(designed by Future Now) did a wonderful job. Upon landing, you have CSS top-up choices , “Individual Professional”, “Small & Medium Business”, “Large and Enterprise Business”. Each one offers very relevant links that lead to appropriate pages, without BS in between.

The Use of Navigation on the Index

Depending on the type of navigation you use, it may benefit and hurt you. A right/left side navigation takes a lot of real estate, so it might make more sense to avoid it(on the index). This however depends on your type of offer. Lending Tree uses right navigation quite successfully.

There are no rules to the design of index pages and websites, so coming up with ideas and testing is key. Explore various website across different industries and borrow from the best. Someone already walked the path and you’ll save a lot of time by using their knowledge and mixing it with your own experience.