For example, Match.com gets half of the job done. They include links from their homepage (including “seniors online dating personals”) that lead to specific landing pages such as this:

http://www.match.com/online-dating/seniors/singles.html

But the problem is, once you land on one of these inside category pages, all of the profiles are the same as on every other page, and they don’t follow up with keywords in the page copy, title tag, or anywhere else in the source code.

This is a waste of a good strategy.

If I do a Google search on “seniors online dating personals” I see the Match.com sub-page comes up as the number one result!

So far so good…

But once they’ve attracted a senior who’s looking for an online dating site, and they completely drop the ball.

But, because the page I land on says nothing about seniors anywhere on the page (and in fact shows me the picture of 20-year old woman from Pearl City, Hawaii), it becomes a negative experience!

Even the search form on the page shows a default age range of 25-45…

Obviously, the links from the home page aren’t there for the site’s visitors, they’re there for the search engines only. But with a few tweaks, the landing pages themselves could serve as great entry points for various niches.

Marketers often make this mistake of trying to attract the search engines, but not thinking about the consequences.

I’d be interested in seeing the conversion rate of this page. My bet is that few visitors bother going any further, and – in fact – would be even more likely to avoid Match.com in the future based on this negative user experience…

He uses 2 cents per unique visitor as the main formula for free sites relying on AdSense for their revenue. If you’re paying for visitors (say $5 per member), “it’s impossible to build a free site on mass advertising.”

Sure, we’ve all read about Markus Frind running the free Plentyoffish.com out of his apartment, and raking in millions through advertising. But he’s a great example of a guy who was in the right place at the right time (not to mention a great entrepreneur).

Just because he made it work, doesn’t mean there’s an endless amount of marketspace for other free, general-interest sites.

The majority of small, niche dating sites need revenue to grow and sustain themselves. Now, if you found a few million in VC funding, you can stop reading.

For the rest of us, there’s no shame in charging for a valuable service. That doesn’t mean a general site that does the same as all the other sites out there…

But a solid niche site that solves its members’ problems well and has found a market that isn’t swamped, can and should charge for its services.

Don’t worry that charging will slow your growth: in fact, charging a reasonable fee can actually spur growth, because it lets you launch an affiliate program, which in turn can open the flood gates to new opportunities.

In the internet dating space, bigger is not always best. According to the latest U.S. numbers from Hitwise, the top niche dating sites are steadily gaining market share while their big mainstream counterparts stagnate.