Every year there are tens of thousands of marriages that occur as a result of people meeting from an online dating service. Online dating is a competitive industry and in order to improve your results, it's vital to enhance your presence.

Online Dating has assembled 5 essential online dating tips to help improve your experience and your success. Use these tips to better understand the industry, yourself, who you are looking for, and to bring about better results.

1) Determine what type of service is best for you.
There are five different types of online dating services that you have to select from. Make sure you select the ones that match up with your goals.

2) Follow important online dating safety tips.
From the time you sign up for a service through the time you meet on a date, it's important to be safe. Read Online Dating Safety Tips article for specific things you should and shouldn't do. In a nutshell: never give out too much personal information; never give a home phone number; always meet in a public place for the first date; ask for a recent photo (or how old posted photos are); and trust your gut instinct. Read the article for more safety tips and full descriptions.

3) Build a winning profile.
Your profile is one of the two key elements that will determine if a person emails you on an online dating service (the other is photo - see next tip). Thus it's important to make sure that your profile is lively, fun, and positive. Avoid negatives (I'm lonely, I can't believe I'm doing this) at all costs. Examine other profiles and determine what about it makes you more interested or less interested. Read Online Dating Profile Tips article for more advice. If a person finds your profile interesting and not generic then you have increased your chances of someone showing interest in you. Make yours interesting!

4) Post great recent photos.
Face it - when doing a search on an online dating service the first thing that grabs your attention is the photo. This is the single most important element to getting people to view that great profile you've written (see last tip). These days, generic photos won't cut it. You need to determine what colors look best on you, dress nice, be clean cut, and have someone take various photos of you that are fun and lively. When I changed my photo from a posed shot to a shot of me with an Orangutan, the number of people emailing me or showing an interest quadrupled. It also provided a great ice breaker and talking point when someone emailed me.

5) Avoid becoming a professional online dater.
Online Dating coined the term "professional online dater" to describe the growing number of people becoming addicted to online dating. The addiction is bad enough that it effects relationships and potential relationships, while hurting others in the process. And hurting others should be the last thing you want to do. A professional online dater is one who is on several dating services, going out on several dates regularly, and always thinking "the next one may be better". If he/she enters into a relationship, they just hide their profile (versus deleting it) and at the first sign up trouble in a relationship, they generally return to the online dating world instead of working out the issues. A professional online dater generally just "drops off the face of the earth" instead of telling you he/she is no longer interested in communicating.