What I don’t see a lot of are people who are looking for Spanish language poker link exchanges. (Maybe they’re out there looking for them and I don’t realize it, because I don’t speak or read Spanish.) So writing a tutorial about how to find Spanish poker link exchanges and link swaps seemed like a good idea.

If I were looking for sites in Spanish to trade links with, I’d start by looking in a Google’s Spanish language search engine for sites about poker. Then I’d start making a list of potential prospects. Once I had my list of prospects, I’d hire and train someone who speaks, reads, and writes Spanish to go through the sites with me. I’d want to know if any of them looked spammy to a native speaker. I’d also want to know what the links page on each of these sites says.

Then I’d have my new hire email and/or call the folks who own these sites and ask for the link exchanges. I’m reasonably sure that most people running a Spanish language site about poker would appreciate hearing from someone in their own language, rather than someone who has written to them in English.

Another option, if you can’t afford to hire someone, is to learn Spanish yourself. That might be too much work for some people, but on the other hand, it might double your income.

An easier option would be to look through those Spanish language results and find sites that are obviously run by English-speaking webmasters like yourself who have launched Spanish sections on their sites, and then arrange a link exchange or content exchange from the appropriate sections of your respective sites.

It’s not enough to just launch content in Spanish. You need to grab a few links to your Spanish content from other Spanish language poker pages. You don’t need an overwhelming number of these links, but a few of them are surely going to be a big vote of confidence in the eyes of Google, right?

On my to-do list today: get some of the pages on this poker software site translated into Spanish, and then get some Spanish poker sites to trade links with me. Maybe I can get a link from the Spanish language version of PokerStars. (Probably not though. I don’t think they do many link exchanges.)

Poker Webmaster Goals for 2010

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is were they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

–Henry David Thoreau

1. Write a poker article every day.

A personal poker article a day challenge is the best thing you can do for your poker webmaster career. Not only will your skills as a poker writer improve (noticeably, and within 3 months), but your skills as a poker editor will improve too. And you’ll be more sympathetic toward the writers you have working for you, and you’ll get a better sense of what the difference between poker content that sucks and poker content that rocks.

2. Write down and prioritize your goals.

Do you know how much money you want to be making from your poker sites this time next year? Do you have an idea of how many pages you need live and how many links should be pointing at them in order to achieve those goals? Write this stuff down, make a checklist, and start ticking things off the list.

3. Read a book every month.

You can choose from two kinds of books: books about poker and books about writing. You want to make money as a poker webmaster, then you should know something about poker. And since poker webmastering is all about poker content, then you should know something about writing well too.

4. Join or start a poker webmaster mastermind group.

You might be using PAL for that purpose already, but consider starting a smaller club with deeper interaction. Consider doing things like content exchanges, team poker blogs, private poker webmaster forums, and weekly conference calls. People get energy from the communities they belong to. Why not form your own poker webmaster group with people you want to get energy from?

5. Subscribe to 5 new blogs.

Sorry, but most poker affiliate and poker webmaster blogs aren’t useful. Poker webmasters just don’t update their blogs often enough to make them useful. Most of the readers here are probably already subscribing to Michael Martinez’s SEO blogs, but some other useful blogs you might consider include Problogger, Copyblogger, and SEO Book.

6. Write  a book.

Publishing a book makes you an instant expert, and being an expert gives your website an authority that you can’t really gain in any other way. The difference between sites that get really high-quality, editorial-chosen links and the sites that have to pay for links is often related to the perceived expertise of the site’s author.

7. Focus on just one poker site all year.

What kind of unique, high-quality poker resource could you create if you worked 60 hour a week on one site and nothing else? How much money could that site make? Do you think that if you put that kind of time and effort into a single poker website that it would be better than most of the other poker sites online?

8. Get a mentor.

You don’t have to do anything formal as it relates to mentoring. In fact, it’s probably better that you don’t. But do find someone who’s more experienced than you are in this business, get to know that person, and hit him or her up for some advice from time to time. Having a mentor to bounce ideas off will improve your business in ways you can’t even imagine.

9. Plan a month’s worth of content.

Or plan a whole year’s worth of content. You’ll be surprised at how relaxing it is to have a poker content production schedule in place for the next 30 or the next 365 days. You can always make adjustments to it later, but planning for it ahead of time has all kinds of benefits.

10. Give something away.

It doesn’t matter what it is, but giving away links is always good. Links are like smiles; they cost little but give much. People will reciprocate in different ways. But the most important thing about giving something away is that you’ll become known as someone who’s generous, and that’s worth more than you think.

I’ll tackle the “how to buy Spanish poker articles” question first. This works for me; it might not work for you. I don’t hire Spanish writers to write original poker articles for me, and I have a simple reason for this: I wouldn’t be able to read the articles to tell whether or not they’re any good. Instead, what I do is hire English writers to write original poker articles for me, and then I have them translated into Spanish.

One of my best friends is from Peru, and his Spanish is excellent. So he’s able to help me determine whether or not the translations I receive are any good. Spanish poker translations can be tricky though, because different languages have various nuances. For example, a friend of mine, a poker webmaster of some repute, told me that he once got some translations where “blinds” had been translated into the foreign language equivalent of what you hang on your windows in order to keep light out.

So, “where to buy Spanish poker articles”? I’m assuming, with my technique, that I have someone who can writer English poker articles. If I were broke, I’d write them myself, but I’m not, so I hire writers. I also hire translators. Luckily, I live in Texas, and I’m able to network with Spanish-speaking people pretty easily. I’ve been able to find very affordable translators as a result. Professional translation services are probably worth the money, but I’m the type of businessperson who will do the little bit of extra work involved to find a better deal for my translations. If I can buy someone lunch and wind up getting Spanish poker article translations for half the price of a professional firm for the next year, then that was money well-spent.

Not everyone is in such a fortuitous position as I am though. Like I mentioned, I have a good friend who speaks, writes, and reads fluent Spanish. So he’s able to review the translations for quality for me. If you’re not in such a position, then it’s a little tougher to go the affordable route. You get what you pay for with translations, just like you do with articles. Remember that time you ordered 10 poker articles for $5 each and they all sucked? Guess how good those dirt low price translations are going to be.

I don’t recommend using automated translation services at all. They just churn out gibberish for the most part. But if you’re really strapped for cash, and you’re really interested in doing automated translations, here’s a suggestion. (I’m pretty sure I got this technique from Michael Martinez.) Step by step:

1. Rewrite your poker article in simple English. “Simple English” is intended to be read by people who don’t speak English as their first language. It uses shorter sentences and easier words. (I try to write in simple English most of the time anyway, but I probably fail.)
2. Use an automated translation tool to translate your first “simple English” sentence into Spanish. I like to do this a sentence at a time. This is time-consuming, but it results in more or less readable Spanish sentences.
3. Take that Spanish translation and translate it back into English using that automated translation tool. If it reads the same as your original sentence, then the translation is probably pretty good. If not, try to rewrite the original sentence in simpler English again.
4. Remember that this technique still isn’t as good as getting a real bilingual person to do the translations for you. But it might or might not be better than having no Spanish language pages at all. That’s up to you. (This technique would probably work for any language, btw.)

Be sure when you publish your Spanish language pages that you correct the html in your head section on the web page to reflect that the page is written in Spanish.

Also, before I sign off today, I wanted to give a quick shout out to this new poker strategy site. The creator of the site contacted me to let me know that a lot of the design principles and SEO strategies he used when building the site were inspired by what he’d read here at my blog. I’m honored to have had anything to do with the creation of such an excellent site – I love it! Here are some of the things I like about the site:

1. It doesn’t look like any other poker site I’ve ever seen. Those tired old Wordpress templates just don’t do it for me, so thanks for not making me have to look at that again.
2. The site isn’t full of flashing banners or images. Most sites WAY over-use banners and images. This site is almost entirely about the text.
3. The “about us” page is easy to find. I hate anonymous poker sites. I think users do too. (Everyone’s interested in who’s behind the scenes on a particular site.)
4. The site is linking out generously. I’m certain that most of the links aren’t there because they were paid for, or traded for, or whatever. They’re just there to be a resource for the user. I don’t know why, but it’s almost always easy to discern intent when look at a site’s outlinks.

Anyway, kudos to Steve for an awesome site. I enjoyed everything about it, including the article about successful Texas holdem. I hope the site is a big success for you.

So much hype about old domains and old sites has been spouted that I’m surprised that anyone even launches new poker sites anymore, much less tries to SEO them. I’ve seen thread after thread offering to sell horrible poker sites with awful content for lots of money, and the only selling point most of those sites seem to have is age. Is age really that important to your SEO efforts? Is it even possible to SEO a new poker site?

I like to launch new poker websites. I enjoy doing SEO for new poker websites. It’s like sitting down to a blank canvas and starting to paint. And if the resulting picture is beautiful and valuable, then it’s because of your efforts. If it’s ugly and worthless, well, you own that too. But with old poker websites, you never quite know how much of your beauty and success (or ugliness and failure) belongs to you and how much of it belongs to the former owners of the site.

I ramble. You came here to read how to do search engine optimization on a new poker site; you’re not that interested in philosophical musings about the benefits and drawbacks of old poker sites versus new poker sites. So here’s my brief guide to SEO’ing new poker sites:

1. Do keyword research. How you do this is up to you. Some people like to use tools. Others use their imagination. I like to use a combination, but it also depends on the website. I’ve built some websites where all of the keyword phrases came straight out of Randy’s brain.
2. Write content. Once you know what topics you want to cover, you write content about those topics. Yeah, it’s a good idea to include your target keyword phrases in the actual text of the content you’re writing.
3. Get links. I’ve written lots of articles about how to get poker links. (In fact, I’m #1 in all 4 search engines for the phrase “poker link building expert.”) Poker link bait strategies can help you obtain links. Poker link exchanges still work well too. Natural links work better than unnatural links for SEO, at least in the long run.

My recommendation is to spend about 10% of your time doing keyword research, 80% of your time writing content, and another 10% of your time building links. Assuming you work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, then you’ll spend half a day (4 hours) doing keyword research, and another half a day (4 hours) building links. The other 4 days you’ll spend writing content. Assuming you can write 5000 words in a full 8 hour day, and that you like 1000 word articles, you can generate 20 articles per week for your site. That’s 1000 pages of content a year.

If each page of your content ranks for 3 keyword phrases, then you’ll rank for 3000 keyword phrases by the end of the year. Even if that content only gets 1 visitor per day per phrase, you’re looking at a 3000 visitor per day poker website, which is a pretty decent sized poker site.

Wait a minute…?

How is this SEO strategy for new poker sites any different from an SEO strategy for old poker sites?

It isn’t.

You do SEO on new poker sites the same way you do SEO for old poker sites. And the cheapest, most effective poker SEO technique will always be to generate lots of content targeting lots of phrases. New poker sites don’t need any kind of special techniques in order to be optimized for search engines. It’s all about keyword research, content generation, keyword repetition, keyword emphasis, and link building.

And once you’ve followed my strategy for doing SEO on a new poker site for a year or so, well, your poker site isn’t new anymore, is it?

Permanent Links

From a philosophical perspective, no links are permanent. Eventually a website is going to change. The owner will die, or she’ll sell the site, or something will happen which will cause your permanent link to become temporary. I like to think of permanence as it relates to links on a sliding scale. Imagine a line, and at one end of the line, your link is going to be live for no time at all. A little to the right of that, the link will be live for one second. A little further to the right, the link will be live for a minute. Then a day, a week, a month, a year, several years, etc. On the far right will be the often coveted “permanent link” which will be live forever.

When thinking about links to your site, it’s helpful to think about where on this line they’re going to fall. If you’re buying poker links, then most of the time they’re going to fall farther on the left side of that continuum than on the right side of the continuum. In fact, most webmasters don’t buy or sell links anyway. They rent them. It’s an important distinction that few webmasters take the time to observe.

What kinds of links fall farther to the right on the permanence continuum? Links from friends are more likely to last a long time than links from strangers. Links from sites which have been live for a long time already are probably going to be live longer than links from sites which are new. (Everything else being equal, an older site will be live longer than a newer site. The owner has already shown commitment by being live for five years instead of for five days.) Links from sites with lots of pages will probably be live longer than links from sites with few pages. A webmaster who’s built 400 pages of content on a site is less likely to shut down a site than a webmaster who has built 4 pages of content.

High PR Links

Lots of people say, “PR doesn’t matter.” But everything else being equal, I’d rather have a high PR link than a low PR link. PR stands for PageRank, and it’s part of the Google algorithm. There’s some debate about how much of a role it plays in the ranking algorithm, but high PR sites get crawled more often and are more likely to be found in main results rather than in the supplemental index. It’s important to understand that toolbar PR isn’t indicative of a page’s actual PR, and Google purposely obscures some pages’ PR values for the sole of intention of cutting the rug out from under the link buying and selling economy.

I don’t worry or stress out about PR when I build links. But am I aware of it? Do I think it matters?

You bet I do.

Poker Links

Someone started spreading a myth about on-topic links a while back, so you’ll occasionally find poker webmasters who don’t want links to their sites from other sites that aren’t about poker. My experience has been that a good link from a good page counts, regardless of whether or not the page that’s linking to me is about a poker related subject. My friend Jim Bob might run the world’s most successful cigar review site and have no interest in poker, but he might like and respect me enough to link to my poker site. I’m not going to turn down his link offer because his site is about cigars and not poker. And I’m not going to refuse to link back to him because of a fear of reciprocal linking penalties either. Or because his site isn’t about poker. Websites and pages can and should discuss multiple subjects.

In fact, if I limit my link building to the “usual suspects”, poker sites which link to other poker sites, then I’ll never be able to get a competitive advantage over the other people in the business. I want links from sites where other people can’t get links, or at least where they might have trouble getting links. I want a unique, diverse backlink profile. That means I’d like to pick up links from Scotty’s site about scotch reviews, and from Jim Bob’s site about cigar reviews, and from Anthony’s site about sushi bars.

Do I want permanent high PR poker links? Sure, I do. So do most poker webmasters.

But lots of poker webmasters mean lots of different things when they talk about “permanent high PR poker links.” What do you mean when you talk about such links?

That one’s easy, actually. Visit a popular poker forum with that many threads. (I used an actual count from a popular poker forum when I came up with that number.) Every single discussion on that forum is a potential article for you. And if people are discussing those subjects in a forum thread, then it makes sense that they’re going to be searching for those subjects in a search engine.

I did a quick search for “poker strategy forums” in Google just now and clicked on the first result. Then I opened up the first forum on the board, without even looking at the subject, and started looking at the names of the threads. All of these threads looked like good poker article ideas to me:

1. Poker Sites for US Players – What to write for this page should be obvious to anyone familiar with the online poker industry.
2. Top 10 Poker Sites – Surely you’ve played enough online poker to know which poker sites are in your top 10. You could do multiple variations of this topic though: top 10 online cardrooms, top 10 Texas holdem sites, top 10 poker blogs, etc.
3. Free Poker Coaching – I can see all kinds of ways to put together an article on this topic, but it’s as simple as asking the 5 W’s and 1 H. What is free poker coaching? Who offers free poker coaching? Why would someone offer free poker coaching? When did free poker coaching become a trend? Where can I find free poker coaches? How can I best take advantage of a free poker coaching offer?
4. Evaluating Villain’s Stats – I actually had to click through to this thread to see what they were discussing here. The person who started the thread has some kind of HUD which displays several of his opponents’ stats while they’re playing: #hands, V$PIP, preflop raises, etc. You could easily write an article discussing the significance of each of those stats and what kind of conclusions you can draw. You could even come up with a more search engine friendly, keyword-rich title for your article on the subject.
5. -EV – Okay, so this isn’t a great thread title, but the subject matter makes for a great article. The poster has played 5000 hands of $5 no limit and has lost $4.39. What advice would you give someone in that situation and why? There’s your article.
6. Hey! – Another nondescript title, but the poster talks about a “how to play poker” app he bought from iTunes. Go buy the app, test it out, and write a review of it for your site.
7. Checking in…- Yet another nondescript title, but the initial post is about a person who took a break from posting and from poker. He’s started playing poker and discusses confidence versus complacency. An article describing the difference between confidence in poker and complacency in poker could be a really interesting subject.

There is no shortage of poker content ideas on the Internet. Finding the glue to apply to the seat of your pants so that you’ll actually sit down and write the content is a whole other thing though.

And yes, I’m still going to post 21 times in November.

Jakob Nielsen hasn’t (as far as I know) written any specific articles about making money from a poker website. Nielsen has written an enormous number of well-researched articles about website usability though. The intelligent poker webmaster can apply the usability knowledge from Jakob Nielsen’s articles to their efforts to make more money from their poker websites. This post provides examples of the usability lessons that can be applied to a poker website, money-making mindset.

Usability 101 and Making Money From Poker Websites

The best place to start at Nielsen’s site about usability is this article: Usability 101

When you look at his page on the basics of usability, consider two things:

1. What information he presents
2. How that information is presented

Usability 101 – Presentation

I notice a few things about the presentation of the page right away:

1. Breadcrumb navigation
2. Search functionality
3. An H1 tag clearly describing the page’s topic
4. A prominent two sentence summary of the page’s contents
5. Multiple H2 tags, bullet points, and numbered lists to make the article scannable
6. No advertising
7. No images

Usability 101 – Content

Reading what the article says, I come away with some of the following information:

• “Usability” describes how easy it is to use an interface (in this case, a website).
• Usability matters because people who can’t figure out how to use your website leave.
• Good usability can double sales on a website that sells a product.
• Improving usability starts with user testing.

Conclusions About Making Money From These Concepts

Secondary forms of navigation like breadcrumbs and search boxes are important to this usability expert. These might be useful elements to incorporate into a poker website in an attempt to make more money. For example, if a user comes to your site, and wants to find information about the best poker signup bonuses, she’s likely to type that phrase into your search box on your site. If you don’t have a search box on your site, she’ll leave your site to go to Google. She MIGHT find a text link to “best poker signup bonuses” in your main navigation, but most poker websites I know of have pretty large navigation menus. (60 or 70 navigational links on a single page is common.)

So, conclusion#1? Add a prominent search functionality to your poker website, and you’ll make more money.

I understand the reasoning behind the scannable copy and the minimal graphics, but those aren’t well-explained on this page, so I’ll wait to share any conclusions about how those can make you more money.

Looking at the content, I see the claim that good usability can double the number of sales your site makes. I’m familiar with Nielsen’s site and his reputation for testing and measuring, so I’ll take him at his word on this. Doubling sales will obviously make me more money. The other claim is that the best way to improve my site’s usability is to conduct user testing.

Conclusion #2? Usability will make more money, and an important way to improve usability is to conduct user testing.

Usability testing is a simple enough process. Just find five average users and turn them loose on your website. Give them a goal for what they want to accomplish on your site, and then watch how easily they’re able to accomplish those goals.

That’s a good start in my quest to use Jakob Nielsen’s expertise to make more money with my poker site, but it’s ONLY a start.

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design and Making More Money From Poker Websites

The next stop at Nielsen’s site is his article about the top ten mistakes in web design. These mistakes are as common (or more common) among poker websites as in any other industry. Below are insights into how some of these mistakes affect a poker site’s usability and profitability. (The website design mistakes Nielsen discusses on his page that DON’T affect poker website usability are not discussed.)

The first mistake on his list is bad search. Few poker sites have an easily found search functionality, so adding a prominent search functionality is one way most poker webmasters can immediately make more money by providing a more usable site. (We figured that out from looking at the design of Nielsen’s other page.)

Mistake #3 is not changing the color of visited links. This provides better usability because website users who can see where they’ve already been are better able to find there way to where they want to go. This is a common mistake among poker webmasters, who are too concerned with appearance. I’m concerned with profit, and usability is a route to more profits. But I have sites where I make this mistake too.

Mistake #4 is non-scannable text. “Scannable” text is easy to scan, so you can find the answers to your questions quickly, without reading the content in-depth. I’m not convinced that this is as big a problem for users as Nielsen suggests, but I tend to write scannable content anyway. It’s easy enough to do: user shorter sentences, bullet points, and headers. This is not as common a mistake on poker sites as mistake #3, but it comes up.

Mistake #7 is anything that looks like an advertisement. This is the most critical and common usability problem among poker websites. I’ve seen entire poker websites where everything on the page looks like an advertisement. How does understanding that this is a usability mistake make you money?

Once you know that users ignore obvious advertising, you can revise your ads’ presentation to make them look like something other than advertising. (Like content, for example.)

Banners, pop-ups, and animations are all obvious advertising, and users ignore these obvious ads.

A sales letter is advertising too, but a review is not advertising. Most poker webmasters are unable to tell the difference, but most users can. Most poker websites offering poker room reviews publish sales letters and call them reviews. No surer way to make less money exists than building a site that looks like an ad or a collection of ads. Except maybe writing  and publishing content that looks and reads like advertising.

Some advertising looks more like advertising than other advertising. A 468X60 or a 728X90 banner ad for PokerStars is obvious advertising. A screenshot of their cardroom client, on the other hand, is useful content that also serves an advertising purpose (assuming you link the screenshot to your affiliate URL). Users wanting to play at an online cardroom don’t care what the cardroom’s banner advertising looks like. But they do care what the cardroom itself looks like.

Animated and flashy banners are ignored by 99.5% of your users. Doesn’t it make sense to focus on different types of advertising?

Mistake #8 is violating design conventions. The article on Nielsen’s site is vague about what this means, other than saying that users spend most of their time on other sites. But I’ll give an example of a design convention violation. Suppose you decide to underline all of your H1, H2, and H3 tags. Since most sites underline text links, users will become frustrated when they try to click on your underlined H tags. The design convention is that only links should be underlined. Sounds like a minor detail, but you don’t make money when a user leaves your site because they’re frustrated. (Most of them aren’t leaving via your advertising.)

Mistake #10 is not answering user’s questions. This is a content issue. I’ve seen poker sites where pages described as “poker strategy” suggested that users visit “the following links” for more information about poker strategy. Those links had anchor text of “poker strategy”, but they pointed to affiliate URL’s for PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. How much trust will a typical user have for this kind of advertising technique? How likely will they be to sign up at a poker room instead of going back to a search engine to find the poker strategy they’re looking for?

Conclusion

Studying two pages of Jakob Nielsen’s site on usability leaves me with several ideas about how to make more money with a poker website. Since the site contains over 500 additional pages of content, I could probably mine it for more money making ideas. You can and should mine his site for ideas for how to make more money with your poker site too.

1. Good poker players who can’t write well
2. Good writers who can’t play poker well

But one would be mistaken. The poor poker writers outnumber the poor poker players five to one.

These poker writing articles are intended for use by poker writers who wish to improve their writing skills. They cover a limited number of topics, and they focus  on correcting common writing mistakes.

Sometimes the best poker writers break all the rules. This series of articles isn’t meant for them.

Improve your writing skills, and you’ll get more poker writing jobs, and you’ll be able to charge more per word.

What is Good Poker Writing?

Good poker writing is clear, concise, and definite. Clarity and precision are everything. My poker writing style relies on short sentences and short paragraphs, but other poker writers write long sentences and long paragraphs. Either style is fine if every word, sentence, and paragraph matters. Length is only relevant when it affects clarity.

For example, a PokerStars review might begin with the sentence:

“PokerStars is by far the largest online poker room for both tournament poker and for cash poker.”

Reviews of PokerStars often begin with this factoid, but what does this sentence tell the reader? “Largest” and “by far” are both meaningless in this sentence because they lack context. Good poker writing is specific; it provides details. This sentence is vague and general.

A better opening sentence for a PokerStars review might read:

“PokerStars hosts an average of 25,800 players, which is almost twice as many as its nearest competitor, Full Tilt Poker, which hosts an average of 15,400 players.”

This sentence asserts the same point, but it’s more effective because it establishes details, specifics, and context. The size of an online poker room is measured by the average number of players they host. The comparison with Full Tilt Poker provides specifics and context. Additional sentences  could elaborate on the number of players at PokerStars as compared to other poker sites, or additional sentences could expand on why player volume matters when choosing a poker site. In either case, expanding that sentence into an interesting paragraph would be easy.

Good poker writing is bold and direct. Good poker writers assert opinions. Good poker writers would rather be wrong than indecisive.

Bad poker writing is timid and vague. Bad poker writers express opinions timidly, if at all. Bad poker writers use non-committal words like “maybe”, “rather”, “perhaps”, and “sometimes”.

A poor writer might write the following paragraph:

“The players at Full Tilt Poker are rather weak sometimes. Most of the cash game players aren’t particularly intelligent, and many of the tournament players play with somewhat low skill levels.”

A good poker writer might write the following paragraph instead:

“The players at Full Tilt Poker are fish. The cash game players are stupid, the tournament players incompetent.”

The second writer might be wrong about the caliber of the players at Full Tilt Poker. But whose review would you rather read in its entirety?

More in the Poker Writing Jobs Series

I have plans to include 4 more articles in this series, and I’ll cover some of the following topics:

• Active Voice Versus Passive Voice in Poker Writing
• Common Poker Article Punctuation Mistakes
• Tense in Poker Articles
• Commonly Misused Words and Expressions in Poker Writing

Writing well matters for poker SEO because good poker writing attracts more and better links.

All large, modern search engines offer multiple search engines. Think of these multiple search engines as channels. Ranking on the main page of a Google poker related search might provide a lower ROI than ranking on several other search channels.

Here are some poker search channels in Google you might consider optimizing for. I’ve also include tips about how to optimize for them.

The Poker News Search Channel

In Google’s main search engine, the phrase “WSOP” has 10 million competitors with that phrase in their title tags. (I like to do an allintitle: search to gauge the competition.)  But the phrase “WSOP” in Google News only has 238 competitors with that phrase in their title tag. (I do an allintitle: search in Google News too.)

Which channel do you think it’s easier to compete in?

Google News undoubtedly sees fewer “WSOP” searches. But if you can be the #9 result on the news page with a little effort, you’ll see a bigger ROI than if you rank #91 in the main results. Volume of searches is only one way of deciding which phrases to target; competition is another (equally important) factor to consider. Volume and competition are also ways of considering which channels to target with your searches.

How do you optimize for Google News? First get accepted as a Google News publisher. Google News has technical requirements, like including a 3 digit number in each of your URL’s. Google also only wants to include legitimate news sources in this channel. How do you make your news source legitimate?

1. Include bylines for your news contributors.
2. Publish on a schedule.
3. Have multiple contributors.
4. Distinguish between editorial content and reporting content.
5. Remain independent of the companies and individuals you cover.

You might  get accepted as a Google News publisher even if you do none of those things. But having professional standards couldn’t hurt.

The Poker Video Search Channel

Google’s video search is popular,  so learn how to optimize for video search. Creating video content comes first. Using your target keyword phrases in the title, description, and file name for the video comes next.

With 19,100 allintitle results for the “WSOP” phrase, Google video search is more competitive than Google news search. Some of this is because there’s a timeframe attached to the Google news results. Expand the default timeframe in the news search, and the number of competitors increase.

But competing against 19,100 pages is still easier than competing against 10 million pages.

The Poker Blog Search Channel

Google also offers a blog search channel. An allintitle:WSOP search in Google’s blog search brings back 125,000+ results for “WSOP”, but that’s still a heckuva lot less competitive than 10 million. Optimizing for the poker blog search channel begins with having a blog. You can launch a blog on your regular site in a subfolder or on a subdomain, but you can also launch a blog on its own domain. Either will work for getting into the blog search results.

Having a poker blog offers so many different advantages to a poker SEO that I’m startled by anyone who doesn’t have a poker blog or two. Some of those advantages:

1. Blogging forces you to publish content on a regular basis.
2. Blogs get indexed fast.
3. Blogs can get links from blog directories.

The poker SEO trick for poker bloggers is getting link love from other poker bloggers. If you want poker links from poker bloggers, develop the following three traits:

1. Sincerity
2. Transparency
3. Generosity

The Poker Image Search Channel

Don’t swipe other sites’ images as part of your poker image search optimization strategy. And don’t use stock photos as part of your poker image search optimization strategy.

Get yourself a digital camera and start practicing some poker photojournalism. If writing poker content is hard for you, then poker photojournalism might be a hidden strength that you haven’t developed yet. If you’re not good at it, you can always hire a photographer.

Or hire a poker cartoonist to write and draw poker cartoons for your site. You could devote an entire site to poker cartoons, or you could create a subsection of your site for these cartoons. And if you have talent as an artist, you can be your own poker cartoonist.

Play to your strengths and focus on creating unique poker images for your poker image search campaign. Poker image SEO basics include using your keyword phrase in poker image filenames, in poker image alt text, and in the text surrounding the poker image. Building links is still part of your SEO campaign, and poker images can attract unsolicited poker links as easily as other poker content.

Other Poker Search Channels

There are more poker search channels you can optimize for. Here are some more ideas:

• Poker Map Search Optimization – People play live poker in specific locations. You can  leverage the map search results.
• Poker Shopping Search Optimization – People buy poker chips, poker tables, World Series of Poker collectibles, etc. You can leverage the shopping search results.
• Poker Discussion Search Optimization – People can search Google Groups for discussions of poker. Are you participating in these discussions? Participation is the first step of optimizing for that search channel. (See my articles about poker social media optimization.)
• Poker Book Search Optimization – You have written a poker book, right? An allintitle:wsop search in Google Books only brings back 4 results, so the competition here is nonexistent.
• Poker Scholar Search Optimization – Unless you have an academic background, optimizing for Google’s scholar search channel is going to be tough. But it’s not impossible, and it’s not competitive. A plain old “poker” search in Google Scholar only brings back 96,000 results.
• Poker Finance Search Optimization – You could launching a public company which publishes poker content. I think this channel might have a low ROI, but the strategic concerns related to going public are broader than just poker search engine optimization strategy.
• Poker Patent Search Optimization – What? You mean you haven’t already filed for a patent for some brilliant poker invention? Create some software, or hire someone to. Then patent it.

Google is only one example of a large, modern search engine offering multiple search channels.

• Optimizing for the “answers to common questions” channel at Ask.com would be a great poker SEO strategy for a beginner poker SEO, and it might even have a better ROI than trying to optimize for Google Video search. The content would definitely be easier to produce for that strategy.
• Yahoo has a jobs search channel (HotJobs). A creative poker SEO could find a way to leverage that, but I’m not going to go into detail on it here.
• Bing has almost all of the search channels available at Google, and if they continue to grow, they’ll launch unique channels you can leverage.

Expand your poker search engine optimization efforts into different channels. If you’re doing poker SEO consulting, consider specializing in optimization for specific search channels.