Even if you succeed in getting the same backlinks that your competitor has, you’re always trying to play catch-up. Which site is going to rank higher, assuming that you have the same backlink profile as your competitor? Everything else being equal, your competitor will outrank you, because your competitors’ links will be older, and your competitor’s pages will be older too.

There are a couple of solutions to this dilemma though. The first one is to go ahead and duplicate your competitor’s backlink strategy, but then do a better job of the other aspects of SEO:

• Do better keyword research
• Write more content
• Write better content
• Use keyword repetition more effectively
• User keyword emphasis more effectively

Since so many poker webmasters rely so heavily on linkbuilding for their rankings, this can be an effective strategy.

Another effective strategy is to build a unique backlink profile. Who can you get to link to your site that won’t necessarily be linking to your competitor’s site?

I can think of a few people to hit up for links to my poker site:

• My web designer
• My graphics designer
• My content writer
• My friends
• My relatives
• Myself (You do have a personal and/or business site don’t you?)

These kinds of links differentiate you from your competitors.

Combine this strategy of developing a unique backlink profile with the strategy of doing a better job at the other aspects of SEO besides linkbuilding, and you’ll be amazed at the results that you see.

I’m going to offer a third strategy related to building links for a poker site. Go for the HARD links, not the easy ones. For example, suppose you find a page with ten links to really high quality poker sites. Suppose this page ONLY links to premium poker sites like Play Winning Poker, CardPlayer, and TwoPlusTwo?

If you were running a search engine that took backlinks into account in its algorithm, would you count those links toward a site’s ranking? I know I would.

On the other hand, suppose you find a page that links to 40 different sites, and the site has 10 more links pages on it, all of which link to another 30 or 40 links? And suppose too that gettting a link from one of those pages is as easy as submitting a form that robotically checks to see if you’ve posted a link back to them?

If you were running a search engine, how much weight would you give to links from that site as compared to the other hypothetical site?

Yeah, it’s harder to get the better quality links. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. I’ve seen persistent webmasters pester a site owner for years before finally getting a link. But those persistent webmasters are the ones who do well in the search engines and rule the poker webmaster world.

It’s NOT just a matter of buying a large enough volume of links to get to the top. That’s just an excuse. Get over it and build yourself a real backlink profile that you can be proud of, and optimize your site better than anyone else has. The fundamentals are simple, but the work can be hard. Do it anyway and you’ll get rich.

How to Find Good Poker Link Exchange Partners

One way to find good poker link exchange partners is to search through some of the better web directories. You know that a site listed in this directory has passed at least one editorial discretion test.

The next step is to look through the list of sites in that category to see which ones have “other sites” or “resources” pages. If they do, then you’ve got a potential link partner. (If they don’t have a links page, then it might be tougher to get a link, because they might have a wonky editorial policy about not linking out to other sites.)

Another way to find good poker link exchange partners is to search through the links pages of some of the sites listed in those web directories. Trust, reputation, and link authority cascade down from good web directories like this, so the links on the link pages of the sites listed on that page above are more likely to be valuable. And, since those people have already traded links with someone else, you know that they’re open to that sort of thing, so your conversion rate will be a lot higher.

Link Out First

For some reason, people in the poker webmaster industry seem to request link exchanges without posting links to the other person’s site first. There was a time when this was consider the only approach to take when asking for link exchanges. I get dozens of link exchange requests each week, but none of them have linked to my site yet. Unless the person writing is someone I already know, I delete those poker link exchange requests immediately.

How much more likely are you to link to someone else’s sit if they’ve already linked to you first? I think it’s human nature to be more likely to link back to someone who’s already done his share of the work.

“Excessive: Poker Link Exchanges

How many poker link exchanges can you do before it becomes considered “excessive”? I haven’t triggered a penalty at any of my sites by exchanging links in a reasonable manner. Years ago, when I didn’t know any better, I participated in a link scheme where I traded links with hundreds of sites at the same time. That triggered a penalty.

Looking through the handful of respectable directories who list poker sites for link exchange partners, I don’t think I could find enough potential link exchange partners to trigger a penalty if I even tried.

How to Get More Value from a Poker Link Exchange

How do you get the most value from your link exchanges? I never trade links with a site without thinking about the potential traffic I could get from a relationship with another webmaster. I have one link exchange with a site that sends me 3 visitors a day. If you can arrange enough of those types of poker link exchanges, you won’t have to worry about search engine rankings nearly as much.

What are the keys to getting traffic from links on someone else’s poker site?

1. Only trade links with other sites that get traffic. (If they don’t get traffic, then think about whether or not the site is likely to get traffic in the future.)
2. Be willing to provide deeplinks to content pages on someone else’s site, and ask them to do the same with your content. You don’t have to limit yourself to link exchanges from your links page.
3. If you are limiting your link exchanges to sites with “links” pages, then only trade links with sites that don’t hide their links to those pages. (You know, the sites with the almost-invisible anchor text in the footer of the page to their “partners” page.)
4. Be willing to send traffic to other sites too. No one is going to camp out on your site for the next year. In fact, most people aren’t going to spend more than a few minutes on your site. Why not recommend another place for them to go?  They might find your link on the site you recommended and come back.

Now and Then

If you were using appropriate poker link exchange tactics in 2003, then those tactics still work. In fact, so many other webmasters have drunk the “I need to buy links” kool-aid that those tactics work better now than ever.

If your websites aren’t doing as well traffic-wise as you’d like them to, then focus on the fundamentals. This link exchange email example from 2000 works as well today as it did then. Poker webmasters are just less likely to go to that much trouble anymore.

Disheartened by the lack of regular content on here lately, I decided to write a new article for Randy’s awesome Poker SEO Blog to hopefully inspire him to get back into writing again.  I’m sure Randy knows full well that from a writer’s point of view, when you stop updating a website it can be hard to start updating it again.  I’ve been in that situation many times before, putting off updating a website “until tomorrow” then looking at the website and realized it’s been over 5 weeks since my last update.  Oops.

While this is primarily an SEO Blog, this article will actually cover the redesign of a sports betting site that I recently did.  If you ask many poker affiliates they’ll tell you the two biggest factors of running a successful website is Search Engine Optimization and Content.  However many seem to neglect visitor optimization, which really should be going hand in hand with SEO and content in terms of your priority.

However sometimes that isn’t always the case – and it is website dependent.  A mini-site you can focus on all three with ease, but with bigger sites sometimes it’s better to wait, study the visitors that come in, and then optimize for them.  On my new Online Casino Guide website for example, we focused primarily on content and basic search engine optimization, and now that we’ve past the 250 article benchmark are now working on both search engine and visitor optimization.  Sections of the website like this Marvel Comic Slot Machines article or the Casino Flash Games section would be two examples of pages where I study what the visitor does, how they go to that webpage, what they do, and then optimize for all of that.

Building a Website

I’m a big believer of “Build It First, Perfect It Later”. Every time I build a website, or every time I write an article, I’m generally surprised by the reaction of web visitors, and the way they navigate it.  I’ve built websites with primary calls to action and secondary content with the belief that the calls to action is enough for the visitors, and been surprised to see the amount of visitors that will spend the time reading the text.

Contradictorily, I’ve written articles where I felt a lot of reading was required, and been surprised at LTK visitors that barely read the article, clicking on some random banner or weak call to action within seconds of visiting the article.

So now whenever I build a website or write an article, I don’t go for the “home run” on the first go.  I go for something simple, I let it sit for awhile, and then I take the time to break it down piece by piece.

Now the first thing you need to know is this: don’t redesign for the sake of a redesign.  Too many people fall into this trap.  If your website is working well and converting well, then you can leave it.  Do minimal things to it for sure, see if you can convert any better – but don’t do a big overhaul just for the sake of it.

Old Website Design

Now I’m obviously optimizing for phrases like “NBA Tips” and “NBA Betting Tips”, and visitors who are looking for recommended betting options for that days NBA game.   So – what does the average web visitor do?  My assumptions when building the site were:

1. They find what they are looking for, in the form of NBA Betting Tips.
2. They click the various calls to action underneath the actual tips, or written within the tips content.
3. They subscribe either via e-mail, RSS Feed or Twitter to stay updated on the tips.

That’s the main three functions I assumed when I built the website, and that was more or less the case.  A few visitors would spend time reading on the site – they’d read some reviews, read about the system, click a few of the background call to actions – but those were few and far between.  The majority did exactly what I expected.

Unfortunately, they never did #2 or #3 enough.  I studied the Clicktale statistics as well as Analytics and some in-house software I utilize.  The majority of visitors were doing #1 and that was it.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’ve been doing very well in regard to conversions – however I really felt I could be doing a lot better.  This website brings in low five figures on an average NBA month, however if you saw my conversion ratio you would be shaking your head – it should be able to make double or even triple what it makes now.  Before going for the big overhaul, I tried a variety of different calls to action on the primary call to action area.  Those included the live odds that you can see in the screenshot above, banner ads, the e-mail subscription form and even big red buttons like this:

I saw some improvement  after using the buttons above, however it just wasn’t enough.  I realized that the time had come where I would have to rethink my whole concept of the website, and redesign it.

And let me tell you – redesigning isn’t a case of “lets put up a new theme and hope for the best”.

(I also just want to add that I don’t want to write anything about figures in this article because really, that’s a whole essay in itself.  It’s not as black and white as “visitors->conversions”, especially with a website like this.  You have to look at unique visitors versus returning visitors and what converts them.  You also have to factor in the likes of my mailing list, my RSS feed and my Twitter in regard to conversions.  Comparing the conversion rate of a first time visitor that googled “nba tips” versus a visitor who has returned to the site for the 5th time in a week via his bookmark just isn’t possible for example, and I just didn’t want to bog the article down with all that.)

Planning the New Website Design

So we’ve established that NBA Tips isn’t converting as well as it should be.    I felt I wasn’t converting as well as I should with the website, both to online gambling properties and to my mailing list or RSS Feed.  After testing out the market with various changes, it was time to do a complete website design overhaul.

Now before you start the redesign of a website you have to ask yourself: what works?  Not what you WANT to work, but what ACTUALLY works. For example, I bet sports professionally, and one of the greatest inventions is mobile betting software.  I’ve spent a TON of time pushing that on all my sports betting websites, to very little conversions.  So while I WANT that to work and I believe in it, that can’t be a focal point of the new website design because it has proven not to work.

So it was time to look at the statistics.  When it comes to analyzing your visitor, you really have to go in-depth – I mean there really is just so much to it.  What if a visitor comes to my page, reads the tips, clicks through my link to a sportsbook landing page but doesn’t convert?  Does that mean the landing page sucks?  Is it as simple as focusing on another landing page within that sportsbook, or even another sportsbook altogether?  Of course not.  There could be a million factors that the visitor didn’t convert.  Lets list some!

1. The sportsbook didn’t accept sports betters from the country the visitor resided in.
2. The visitor clicked through just out of convenience – they already have an account with that sportsbook.
3. The visitor clicked through looking for information on a specific subject, didn’t find it immediately then closed the page.  For example if they clicked through on a banner that promotes a sportsbook bonus, but the landing page was a registration form with no information about the bonus, then they are less likely to convert.
4. The visitor clicked through, went to register, saw a “signup code” field, googled “_____ signup code” and got tracked that way.
5. The visitor speaks a language which the sportsbook doesn’t support.

That’s just five reasons, and there are many more.

Now when I was looking at the statistics, I was looking for one thing: what is my primary moneymaker? What do I want to push the most?  When I initially started the website, the tips were the main focus point.  The reason for that is that I trusted in my system that we’d have winning seasons, and that eventually I was aiming to go to a fee-based subscription service.

I ultimately decided against that model, so I was left to determine what the most profitable solution was for me – what should I make prominent on my website?

To make a long story short, I discovered 4 key factors which would influence the design of the new website:

1. The most money came from the e-mail & RSS subscribers.
2. Short blurbs about a sportsbook in bullet point format followed by a link converted very well.
3. Live odds were converting poorly.  My “Where to Bet NBA” article was converting really well.
4. The calls to action under the tips when it came to unique visitors converted poorly.

The most important one of the above four is #1.  It was a lot eaiser to convert visitors to e-mail or RSS subscription than it was to gambling properties.  More importantly, this is where the most money was coming in.  My theory on that is the trust factor.  People have signed up and continue to remain subscribed because they trust my picks, so converting them to sportsbooks is even easier due to the trust factor.  If I tell them to sign up at a sportsbook and why they should do that, then I was seeing ridiculously high conversions.

So based on that, building the website was easy.  While the website is about NBA Tips and that’s what the visitor is looking for – the tips wouldn’t be the most prominent part of the website anymore.  If they want tips then they can hunt for them, and fight their way through my various calls to action first

The New Website Design

Note how I have taken what WORKS and made it the focal point of my website. E-mail and RSS subscription works the best, so that is now the #1 primary focus point for all new visitors, and my main aim is to get those subscriptions.

If that fails to convert, then they are next presented with the next best thing that works: where to bet on the NBA.  A list of sportsbook, all provided in bullet list format, with easy links to reviews or to bet now.

Failing a conversion there, then the visitor is left with the actual tips, which they must click to get to.  And did you know that a visitor that visits more than one page of your website is a lot more likely to convert than a visitor that just visits one page?  It’s true, but that’s an article for another day.  Now that they HAVE clicked through I can try various other calls to action on them.

Is this change going to work?  It’s a bit too early to tell.  Things are looking good however it could be the upcoming NBA Playoffs that are dilluting the statistics.

However whether or not it works isn’t really the point of these articles – it’s to remind you that everything has a purpose.  Every time you look at your website, or you ask someone else to look at your website, don’t be thinking about the overall design.

It’s not about how a website looks cosmetically – it’s whether or not the website serves its purpose to the visitor, and if it does so in a manner which will help you convert visitors.

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.