Poker SEO – Casino and Gambling SEO Tips and Advice

by Randy Ray

Some people might not be able to afford my consulting fees, but they might want to get some information from me about search engine optimization for casino gambling or poker sites anyway. This article is for them. It’s a collection of thoughts and tips about how to SEO your website.

1. Plan your SEO BEFORE launching your site

The biggest and most common mistake I see from poker and gambling webmasters is to launch the website and content while planning to do the SEO work later. The attitude that search engine optimization is something you do as a tweak to a site or a page after it’s been launched is the worst attitude a site owner can have. SEO is about planning, information architecture, and content decisions.

This first tip was mocked by an SEO posting at one of the more popular gambling webmaster forums. Has this particular search engine optimization consultant ever worked for a large site, he’d had realized that a lot of people running websites think that the whole optimization process is something that happens after the site is built.

It’s not.

Not planning ahead of time is one of the biggest and most common mistakes I’ve seen.

Yeah, it’s a tip for beginners. Not every piece of advice is aimed at experts.

2. Plan to build a content-rich website

I tell this story all the time, but I’m going to tell it again here. I launched maybe 10 crappy gambling sites with about 10 crappy pages on each of them when I first got started in this business. None of them got very much traffic, and I didn’t make much money with them. But I launched a poker site and wrote good content for it, and lots of it. When I hit 100 pages of real content, I emailed Steve Badger bragging about my 100 pages of content. He emailed me back, “Great. Now you finally have a real website.”

Having lots of pages of good content is the best SEO strategy you can have for 3 reasons:

1. Each page gives a search engine new keyword phrases to rank you for and send traffic from.
2. Each good quality page of content gives other webmasters and bloggers another reason to link to your site, which will help you rank better.
3. Every page on your site has links to your other pages. Links from your own site count too.

You don’t stop at 100 pages, by the way. Keep going. More pages = more traffic. More traffic = more money.

3. Don’t stress out about the domain name

You’re not going to find a great poker domain name now anyway, so try to come up with something reasonably short and maybe memorable. Texas Holdem.com got registered a long time ago.

4. Keep your site design simple

Launch HTML pages without a lot of javascript or flash. Use images sparingly. Put a lot of text on each page, like between 500 and 1500 words. Your site will load faster, which is friendly to your users, and the search engines will better be able to crawl the pages.

5. Do the basic on-page search engine optimization stuff

The first step is to know which main keyword phrase each page is trying to rank for. The next step is to have a couple of secondary phrases each page is trying to rank for.

Then emphasize those keyword phrases on the page:

• Include them in the title tag and description tag
• Include them in the header tags
• Include them in the actual text on the page
• Include them in the alt text of your images
• Emphasize your keyword phrases using bold and/or italics

Basically, you want to make it clear what your page is about. This is good for the user and the search engines.

6. Get links, but don’t stress out about it

Getting links is easy when you have a good site, and hard when your site sucks.

Trade links with other good quality websites. Don’t believe the people who say that reciprocal links don’t count, because they’re missing the whole point. Sites that link to other good sites do well in the search engines, and you don’t get penalized when good sites link to you. In fact, you should probably link to good sites even when they’re not linking back to you, as a service to your website visitors.

You should also submit to directories, do press releases, and participate in online communities like forums and blogs. Don’t spam, but don’t be shy about who you are either. You want links from sites that use editorial discretion when deciding who to link to. Sites that link to anyone who links back to them are useless, and they should be.

You don’t need tremendous amounts of links. 10 good links will help you far more than 1000 crappy links.

7. Pay attention to your traffic

Google Analytics is great for seeing what people find your website for, but any kind of website traffic analytics tool will do. You’ll find keyword phrases that you rank in the top 20 for that you weren’t even targeting. Once you find those, you can create content targeting that phrase and rank in the top 10 easily. (If someone visited your site, and you were on the 2nd page for it, then chances are lots of people will visit your site for that phrase if you’re in the top 10.) Once you get started on this, you’ll never lack ideas for new content pages.

8. Stay away from the dark side

If you’re going to go to all of the trouble to build a website and generate content for it, wouldn’t you like for it to receive traffic for a long time? If you stay totally white hat and above board, you’ll never have to worry about getting banned from or penalized by a search engine. That means you can make money from search engine referrals for years and years.

Finally

SEO is like poker. There are lots of subtleties and nuances involved in being world-class. But even mediocre players can be profitable poker players if they play in good games with weaker players and do the basics of folding bad hands and raising good hands. You can make a fortune as a poker webmaster just by following the basics of good search engine optimization. And that’s just not terribly hard to do