Choosing between a nice looking header image for your logo and a text logo is more important than you think. It affects your SEO, branding, visually impaired visitors and of course the look of your design. Let me show you how…

Search Engine Optimization

Registering a great keyword-rich escort domain is always going to help with your SEO because it lets google know that your site is relevant for those keywords. ie for the search term “New York Escorts” if google had to choose between 2 sites that were exactly the same except one had the domain newyorkescorts.com and the other had classycourtesans.com then which seems more relevant?

If these 2 sites also had text-based headers then google would also see that the words “New York Escorts” shows up in big text at the top of one and “Classy Courtesans” shows up in big text at the top of the other. This will be another win for the “New York Escorts” website because it proves again to google that they are relevant for that search term.

If both sites had an image for their logo then neither win. Google can’t read images unfortunately so the “New York Escorts” site loses the added SEO advantage of having their keywords on the top of every page. The search engines will then have to check the rest of the content on your page to decide whether the page is relevant or not.

Branding

What does the Coca-Cola logo text look like? Coca-Cola spend hundreds of millions every year to burn that image into our brains. How stupid would it be if they then went and used a text-based logo on their website? For them, the branding is much more important than any SEO benefit. No one is going to discover Coca-Cola for the first time by finding them in google. Your boutique escort agency probably will though…

Visually Impaired

Our eyes naturally lose their ability to focus well as we age and there is a huge number of younger people that need glasses for reading. Make life easy for them by using high-contrast text for your logo. Pressing Ctrl, ‘+’ on a windows computer (Option, Command, + on a mac) allows users to zoom in on your website. If you’ve got an image logo then zooming in will cause it to get pixelated, whereas a text-based logo will stay crisp:

Look of Your Site Design

Being in the business of website designs I definitely understand the importance of a site’s design – one of our differentiating factors is that our escort template designs look like custom work. There is a lot more stylistic freedom when using an image-based logo. It will also look exactly the same in internet explorer, firefox, safari and all the other browsers. That’s not to say that a logo has to look crap if it’s text. Below are a couple of clients who prove my point:

Text-Based Browser-Friendly Fonts

The main problem with text-based fonts at the moment is the web browsers only support a limited number of fonts. You’ll need to choose from that list for your website’s font.

Our logo

Why’d we go with an image-based logo? Branding is the main reason, as a design company it’s important that we show off a bit with our site so that you can be confident we know our shit. It always amazes me when I see “web-design companies” that have horrible designs, what hope have their clients got! Our SEO efforts over the past years has meant that we can get away with not having a text logo without our rankings being affected too much.

Google PageRank (PR)

This is the ranking between nothing and 10 that google gives every site on the internet. If you feel like boring yourself to death read more about PageRank but if you just keep in mind a few points you’ll be set, in general:

• Higher PageRank means that a site has more links pointing to it and google thinks the site is more credible than a site of lower PageRank
• You and a competitor have 2 sites with similar content and number of pages trying to rank for same keywords. The one with higher PageRank wins and shows up higher for those keywords
• The PageRank number is determined by the number of websites that link to you and the PageRank of those links, so a site with a lot of links (especially from sites with high PageRank) will, in turn have a higher PageRank
• One PR2 link is not equal to two PR1 links, it’s a logarithmic scale so it’s more like 10xPR1 links = 1xPR2 link

The best way to check the PageRank of different sites is to download the firefox browser and install the Search Status Toolbar – then you’ll see the number in your bottom right corner. Keep in mind that for a small site a PR of 2 or 3 is decent, no one in the adult industry will have a PR of greater than 5.

Number of outbound links

You’ve been offered a link from a PR1 page, excellent! You then find the page has 500 other links on that page, not so excellent… The PR of a page gets divided up between all of the links that are on that page, so if 2 pages have the same PR but one has less outbound links on it then that is the one you’d prefer the link on.

Nofollow tag added to link

Even if you manage to get your link on a site, there are tricks a webmaster can do to prevent that link from passing on the PR juice. Thankfully the Search Status firefox toolbar I mentioned above also has a nifty function “highlight nofollow links”. This will highlight in red any link that has the “nofollow” tag added to it, if your link is one of these then don’t be fooled by the value you are seemingly getting from a link.

Without going into too much detail, webmasters can also add a tag to their meta information that does the same as the above except for every single link on a page. View the source of a page and keep an eye out for:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW“>

The “nofollow” means that once again you aren’t getting the link juice from your link being on that page.

Link text

What’s google’s main goal when they are coming up with their search results? They want the person conducting the search to be presented with the most relevant results from credible websites. This means you have to get links pointing to your site that use the keywords that you want to rank for. So if you are trying to rank for “New York Escort Agency” you’d better make sure you have some links to your site with those exact words! If you get 1000 links to your site from a completely irrelevant site that uses keywords you aren’t trying to rank for then they’re pretty much worthless.

Forget your banner

A banner might look awesome and attract a lot of attention if it’s in the right place (probably not if it’s on a page with 100 other flashing banners) but unfortunately it doesn’t pass on any link juice. So although they may be great for getting traffic directly, they are useless as far as SEO is concerned. A text link that uses your keywords is going to be a much better option and the person giving it to you probably prefers it to a banner anyway.

Now fix your link strategy

Now you know a little about link quality, there’s a few things you should do to optimize the time you spend trying to get links to your site. Target websites with higher PR, low outbound links, related to your site (yes, competitors are a great place to get relevant links so suck it up and offer to trade links) and make sure they link to you using a text link that includes the keywords you want to rank for. Good luck!

Please note: These steps will help you get better links for your website SEO so you can rank better in search engines like google. Obviously if you have a huge banner link on a high-traffic website that is going to provide value in the extra visitors it brings you directly, in which case the above rules don’t really apply.

Forget the SEO company if they:

Promise a top google ranking. No one can promise a top google ranking except google themselves, if they are so sure of getting you a top ranking tell them you’ll pay in increments: 5% when you’re on the first page of google, 10% when you’re in 9th position, 20% in 8th position and so on – somehow I don’t think they’ll be so eager for your business with this arrangement.

Promise instant results. Although with the right SEO techniques you can get reasonably quick improvements in your escort site rankings, generally SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. Even if they do manage quick results, there’s a chance they are using black hat SEO techniques that will have your website banned from the results completely quicker than you can say ’shit’. Read how Kahmir managed to ruin a $5k/month business by using black hat techniques.

Have an alexa ranking of >500k. Alexa ranks every website on the web in terms of how much traffic they get. Google has the #1 ranking of course, followed by facebook. Although a high ranking site may have cheated to get there, a site with a low ranking is struggling to get people through their own door, how much success are they going to have getting people through yours? Especially when you’ve just paid them a juicy up-front fee. To check a site’s alexa rank just enter their domain in their lookup tool or download the search status plugin for firefox like I do (this way you can get a quick idea of how well established any site you visit is).

Can’t explain what they will do. Can’t take the time out to explain what they are going to do to boost your rankings? Is that really someone you want to work with? It was Einstein who said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” so even if you don’t know all the lingo it probably says more about them than you.

Can’t show you previous client results. If they have passed the first few screening tests then refuse to show you some client sites they’ve helped rank then move on and if they do show you some client sites make sure you contact the site owner yourself to test if the company’s talking BS.

Disclaimer: At different times in the past we have offered escort SEO packages to our clients, with mixed results. With such a knowledge chasm between us and most clients, it tended to be a situation where we had tried to make SEO affordable but had constant problems with clients overly high expectations. When someone wants to pay $300 then expects a top google ranking within days things will never end well. These days we are focusing on empowering independent escorts and escort agency owners to do their own Search Engine Optimization, we do this with an easy to use website and giving away our knowledge free through this blog and the private forum. Perhaps we’ll come up with a workable solution some time in the future or just be more picky with the clients we take on.

**Updated: Spam you via email. Don’t know how I forgot this one when I receive daily reminders in my inbox! Don’t ever use an ‘SEO’ company that sends you an email containing things like this:

“We are a team of 50+ professionals which includes 18 full time SEO experts. We are proud to inform you that our team handled 100+ SEO projects and obtained 40000+ manually built links in the past 1 year.”

If you’ve got so many SEO projects and you’re having so much success then why are you contacting me? If you are “professionals” then why are you using spam to generate your business? Surely no one falls for these?!

The answer is simple and Lucy was absolutely right in thinking that google doesn’t allow ads concerning prostitution. Those of you who are observant may have also noticed that some people DO get their website listed through adwords on the google search results pages for words like ‘escort’. Before you start complaining about Google being unfair, do a quick test for me – click on the ad and see whether the page you get taken to says anything about escorts. It doesn’t and there’s a good reason for this. Google does not allow promotion of escort-related websites through adwords but it does not prevent people from bidding on escort-related keywords.

In other words, if your page contains anything advertising prostitution then it won’t be accepted in adwords. So what’s the solution? Either save your money and try some of the free escort marketing options available or create a web page that is completely free of any escort-related content to be used as your landing page. I have not tried this personally but in theory it should work. However, be warned because your page will probably not look very enticing to whoever clicked on your ad and they may not continue to view your website anyway.

Thanks again Lucy for your question, I hope this answer helps!

Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
We will be using google for our examples because it is the biggest search engine and the one that can provide you with the most traffic (although bing.com is starting to gain some market share).

Google’s sponsored listings are those that show up in the yellow box at the top of the search results and the links down the right side, the companies that show up here pay a certain price per click to show up here. Buying these ads is done through google Adwords but unfortunately google will not allow you to advertise your escort business through these sponsored listings.

Since you cannot advertise your escort website through google’s sponsored listings, we will be focusing instead on Google’s organic search results that show up on the left side of the page just below the yellow sponsored listings box. As you can see our website escortdesign.com shows up first for the search term “escort design”, hopefully with our help you can get your site to the top position for your keywords.

How does google decide who shows up at the top? Relevancy and reputation…
This is the million dollar question and one we will approach logically without going into detail about the complex algorithms at play. Why do you use google to search the web? Because it shows you useful results that are relevant to your search query. If you searched ‘escort design’ and it showed up with pet shop listings I don’t think you would be in a hurry to use it again! So what google wants is to show you results that are relevant to what you have searched. In the example above, google has decided that our site escortdesign.com is the most relevant for the search ‘escort design’.

In addition to being relevant, google also wants a site that has a great reputation – this is why searching ‘news’ in google will show up with big newspaper websites rather than a small blog written by your neighbour.

Using your site’s meta info to help with relevancy and clicks
I know you’re probably thinking what on earth is meta info? Well all websites on the internet consist of lines of special code called html, this can be viewed in internet explorer by clicking View > Source. Below is how the escortdesign.com home page source looks:

At the top of the page you will notice these lines of html:

<title>Escort Website Design Services – Escort Web Design Specialists</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Escort Website Design, click or dial +1-800-592-6276 for Amazing Escort Web Designs. We’ve got the Best Prices & Quality Guaranteed!”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”escort website design, escort design”>

Now the first line is called the “title tag”, the second line is the “meta description” and the third is the “meta keywords” line. These 3 lines of code together are your site’s “meta info” and are used by google to see what your website is about, eg we are a company offering “Escort Website Design Services” so we included it in our title tag. So an independent escort called Belle La Rouche from New York City might have meta info like this:

<title>Belle La Rouche – New York City Escort</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Belle La Rouche is one of New York City’s Premier Escorts, Offering a Private and Intimate Experience You Won’t Forget”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Belle La Rouche,New York City Escort”>

This meta info tells google that Belle wants her site to be relevant for the keywords “belle la rouche” and “new york city escort” and if these words were also used throughout her site then google will see her site as relevant for these key terms.

Using your site’s meta info to help with clicks
Now that you know the basics of including your keywords in your site’s meta info to help google see you as relevant for your search terms, the next stage is making your site title and description appealing so if someone sees your site in the results they will click on it. Those with a good eye for details may have noticed that the escortdesign.com meta info is what shows up on the google search results page:

<title>Escort Website Design Services – Escort Web Design Specialists</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Escort Website Design, click or dial +1-800-592-6276 for Amazing Escort Web Designs. We’ve got the Best Prices & Quality Guaranteed!”>

So the text you insert into your title tag and meta description is especially important because it is what your potential clients will be reading when they do a google search, for this reason make sure it’s appealing and uses capital letters to stand out.

Editing your site’s meta info
So you’ve decided exactly what to include in your site’s meta info, now how do you get it “into” your website? For those who are not using the EscortDesign.com Content Management System you will have to edit your site’s code yourself or ask your webmaster to make the change for you. If you are on our Content Management System it is as simple as entering the information into the meta info fields and clicking ’save’:

This is just one of the many ways the Escort Design Content Management System is helping our clients to optimize their sites for google and increase their earnings. Our goal is to educate all of our clients so they can manage their own site and be in total control of their business and marketing. Click Here To read more about the Escort Marketing & Promotional Features included with every site we sell.