Layar: First Mobile Augmented Reality Browser Is Your Real Life HUD. Now *this* is a cool mobile application. Imagine being able to hold your camera up to a person and have it display their profile. Scary big-brother implications but this is part of the natural evolution of mate-finding. Location-based mobile dating applications are fast becoming a commodity, it’s features like this that will catapult a few companies to the front of the class.

Should You Pitch a Branded iPhone App? – Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology. Mobile app usage quickly drops off precipitously.

meetMoi and ClearSky Mobile Media Team Up to Offer Mobile Dating to Regional Wireless Carriers. What’s the better business model, a mobile dating startup or a large established player offering mobile services?

TIME magazine on Online Dating and Genetics.

iPhone users are buzzing with excitement about the iPhone Vibrator App from MyPleasure.com.

Either these people are in a blissful life-long marriage or they’re back in Vegas for round two shortly afterwards. The World’s Most Unusual Weddings

PlentyofFish on getting people to read your emails:

We’ve found that Women READ your profile BEFORE they open your email. If your profile description sucks it doesn’t matter how good your email is. Make sure your description contains “Hopes and aspirations”, “Hobbies/interests in general”, “Musical Tastes”. These are all conversation starters and will show a women you have something in common with her. If your profile description is blank or super short you are 9 times more likely to get “unread deleted”. Edit your description section.

Publishers Hire ComScore To Kill Off The Click-Through.

BlogTalk Radio Dating Shows.

My neighbor works for HubSpot, a Boston marketing company that offers unique marketing tools, services and seminars. They are offering a free webinar titled Marketing Detox: Getting Off Google AdWords PPC Crack.

There are several iPhone applications catering to gays, who appreciate the ability to hook-up while the go. Skout recently launched BoyAhoy destination site and application. How do mobile usage patterns differ between gays and straights?

Dating sites might want to consider embedding SEO terms in Flash files: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Flash indexing with external resource loading.

I spend a lot of time reviewing dating site copy, which is usually the last thing dating sites think about when launching a site. Focusing on copy can dramatically improve user response.

I have a ton of work to do and then it’s off to LA for iDate on Wednesday. After weeks of rain, I am hoping for a few days of uninterrupted sun.

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I have several projects which require top-notch affiliate marketers and SEO gurus. I need to have conversations with the best and the brightest people and companies doing online marketing in the online dating space to understand how you may be able to contribute.

Ability to flawlessly execute, blow our minds with your brilliance and work internationally are the pre-requisites.

Expecting to hear from a number of people, it would be helpful to have your pitch and relevant case studies ready to share and be able to explain why you’re better suited to work with us than the other companies we’ve already talked to. The SEO/affiliate side of the house tends to keep a low profile, hoping this post will entice a few of the major players to have a conversation about how we might be able to work together. Feeling qualified and ready to get to work? Let’s do this.

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Matt Cutts is the man on campus at Google if PageRank and SEO is your thing. Matt recently wrote about PageRank sculpting, which I found informative and enlightening. This blog has a PR of 5, which I’m happy with, given the amount of outbound links which could easily drag it down to a 3 or a 4. Very interesting points made about linkfarms, PageRank flow throughout your site and how SEO tricks compare to simply writing great content thats useful and easily linkable.

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1. Landing Page Optimization Webinar A Success
2. Yahoo Personals Home Page Critique
3. TheOnion.com/MasterCard Personals Points Promotion

I have to remind myself to look at dating site home pages when I’m not logged in. Match has done a redesign and the SEO team has made the page a giant mess, but at least we see some nice dentistry, and what’s that? Match now accepts Paypal.

Question: OnlinePersonals Watch makes about $25,000 a year on affiliate text links within blog posts and in the sidebar. I’ve played with the idea, seems like I’m leaving money on the table here, but part of me wants to keep the ads in the sidebar where they belong and not commingled with my commentary. What do you think? Maybe I could start a dividend program for frequent commenters :-)

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Looks like JLove has been up to some questionable Search Engine Optimization tricks. It seems the Jewish dating startup has been creating fake profile pages for people who don’t belong to the service. Whatever they are doing, traffic is up 500% in recent months.

For example, here is a list of people with the last name science on JLove.

I tried to find all the of Smiths via the url http://jlove.com/names/s/smith/ but that returns an error, “Problem accessing http://donmills/names/s/smith/index.html.”

The thread about this at Text Technologies has been Slashdotted. Lots of inane banter more about protecting your identity than the specific issue with JLove, but still brings up interesting questions about authenticity and reputation.

I’ve tried to contact the JLove PR department several times in recent months and have never received a response. Is anyone paying attention over there?

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Good beginner SEO tips for those of you who don’t feel like shelling out thousands of dollars to questionable SEO “experts.” Provided by Matt Cutts, the Google search guru who is often the front line when it comes to interfacing with webmasters.

There are many websites and books that cover the majority of SEO/SEM strategies and tricks. Its worth it to understand how to make it easy for users to find your site. Matt’s site should be one of your first stops.

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Widgetbait Gone Wild talks about using widgets to build links back to dating sites. Matthew Inman did this for his site, JustSayHi, and Google spanked him big time for inappropriate linkbaiting.

Some of you might remember I left SEOmoz last year to join up with JustSayHi with the intention of creating the world’s biggest, baddest free online dating site. Using these quizzes, I had a creative way to rank our site for competitive keywords in an industry that is primarily dominated by paid links, directory spam, and other greyish-black SEO tactics. We ranked #1 for online dating, free online dating, and numerous other very competitive terms. We were averaging over 2,000 new members a day and passed the 500,000 member mark.

Here’s what these less than savory online marketing tactics will do to your monthly visitor traffic.

A nice trend line, but at what cost? The JustSayHi numbers are not going to have PlentyOfFish worried, but still pretty respectable traffic, if not the way it was acquired. Too bad Matthew didn’t read this blog, he would have reconsidered his approach and perhaps not have gone through so much wasted energy. Then again, I’m not an SEO wizard, but a more reasoned approach to traffic driving might have grown the site similarly without all the hassle.

Starting a free dating site that’s not a niche is not a very good idea these days but alas, people will continue to try and get rich quick, and fail, as is often the case when people that know little about online dating, or people in general, get into the game.

I’m not commenting on anyone in particular, but the online dating space is full of unsavory characters that run dating sites that make a lot of money. Same goes for matchmakers. I’m trying to give up being frustrated about the misalignment between soul, intent and bank account, it’s difficult. We haven’t even begun to see the end of opportunists that barrage us with poorly designed sites, un-targeted advertising, black-hat SEO and no customer service.

Ok, rant over. Google penalized JustSayHi, Matt Cutts got into the conversation, and Matthew, realizing he screwed up royally, started over with a new domain name, OnePlusYou.

Matthew says they are going to be “as 100% squeaky clean as we could and do our best to stay within Google’s guidelines.” However, within a few weeks, Google wrote to tell OnePlusYou that they were up to “the same off-topic widget tricks all over again on another site.”

The new OnePlusYou site launches soon, we’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how it performs in the coming months.

Here’s the link to the Guardian article about Matthew Inman.

While thinking about white and black-hat SEO, I dug up some numbers of interest. Check out the monthly visitor graph and traffic-driving keywords for three popular dating sites. SinglesNet has 4,714 keywords , Mate1 has 827 and PlentyOfFish 7,211 has keywords. Interesting that SinglesNet has less keywords working for them yet 13M more monthly visits per month. What is driving the additional traffic?

As I spend time paying attention to dating site SEO practices, I’m becoming more and more concerned at how the customer is being left behind at the altar of conversion metrics and monthly visits. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, just sayin.

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MIT Advertising Lab writes about a new SEO plug-in for Firefox.

SEO for Firefox is a little plug-in for search engine optimizers (optimizators?) that ammends Google and Yahoo search results will all sorts of related trivia on sites that show up in the search results. This will give you an idea why certain site is ranked higher up than others for a particular search term.

Great idea, and make sure to check out the typo generator.

Related posts:

1. Firefox integrates dating sites
2. Userplane powers Date.com, announces search tools
3. Mozilla To Build Social Networking Into Firefox