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Succeeding With an Erotic Story Site
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on March 03rd, 2010)
There was an interesting ... but as per usual ... short thread over on one of the major adult webmaster boards today about erotic story sites. Of course, having written hundreds and hundreds of erotic stories myself, it was a thread I just had to have a look at.
It seems that the thread starter had set up his own erotic story site in the hope of attracting plenty of traffic from the search engines and at first glance that seems like a great idea. Hey ... erotic story sites consist of words and words are what you need to get listed in the search engines right?
While he didn't actually say how his site had ranked in the search engines he did say that he had received no traffic at all and he considered that the project had been a total failure. That must have been terribly frustrating for him because I know how long it can take to write a good erotic story and if you're passionate about your writing then you can't help but put a little piece of yourself into every story that you write.
His experience got me wondering about why a site that delivered plenty of words with each update might fail in the search engines and I think it basically came down to two of the fundamentals that have an influence on the rankings of every site ... no matter whether they're mainstream or adult.
Keywords and keyword phrases
The first fundamental is the words themselves. When search engines go looking for the signs that they can rank a site for certain terms they look for those particular terms in the text that appears in the site.
But when you write a story you tend to let the storyline take control of the words that you write so it's almost impossible to focus on any particular set of keywords or keyword phrases. Instead you tend to use generic terms that a search engine will find on plenty of other sites because the story just flows along.
While generic terms aren't always a bad thing when it comes to erotica the generic terms writers tend to use in their stories are not the terms that people will use when searching for the porn niche that turns them on. So instead of competing for specific terms that people search fo,r an erotica site may be find themselves competing for generic terms with your more usual adult sites that achieve much better rankings through factors such as age and inbound links.
Inbound links
The second fundamental that any erotica site has to get work on is inbound links. While I am a firm believer in the fact that it's quite possible to get good rankings for some sites with no inbound links that's not going to be the case with adult story sites ... especially story sites that are lacking in relevant keywords and keyword phrases in the body of each story.
Any new adult story site is going to be competing with the likes of Literotica and a few others that have been around for years. No only do those sites have age on their side but they also have many thousands of inbound links ... some from places that Google would consider to be experts in that area and so those links would be like gold.
It's going to be very hard for a new site to compete with those.
Achieving your goal
So is it impossible to build an adult story site that will compete well in the search engines?
No I don't think that it is and it's a challenge that's now got my brain ticking over as it looks at ways to get those good rankings and produce good sales that would pay for all the time it would take to produce such a site.
I believe that if you wanted to build an adult story site that would rank well in the search engines then the very first thing you would have to do is focus on a very specific niche. Start with that focus and make sure that important keywords and keyword phrases appear throughout the stories you write.
Make sure that those very specific keywords and keyword phrases that are important to the niche that you're targeting appear throughout the text and not just in the titles. That's going to be hard to achieve and time-consuming too but if you want those good listings that's what you're going to have to do.
I'd throw in some relevant pictures as well ... not just for eye candy and to break up pages of text ... but to give me some extra places to add in some of those keyword phrases that might not fit well in the story.
Inbound links are really going to be a problem unless of course you already have quite a network of websites of your own. If you have then you can start the ball rolling with links from those sites ... but you would have to go well beyond your own web of sites if you wanted to get up there in the listings and compete with the sites that are already there.
There are also some other things that I haven't mentioned here that you would need to deal with. Things like keyword research for the right niches ... traffic research to see which niches are worth chasing ... and whether it's better to use straight HTML or a content management system as well.
So I don't think it's impossible to rank in the search engines ... and pull in some traffic from them ... but it will take time and plenty of effort ... and there may be easier ways to make money here in adult.
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