Poker Blog and Poker Microblog Optimization

The title of this post (“Poker Blog and Poker Microblog Optimization“) might make one think that you’re about to learn how to optimize your poker blog for the search engines. But this post is actually the second in a series of posts I’m writing about social media optimization for poker websites. If you’ve read that post already, then you know that the goal of social media optimization is to increase the amount of visitors you’re receiving via social media channels. This post explains how to conduct blog social media optimization – how to get more traffic to your poker site via blogs and microblogs.

Have a poker blog yourself. In social media optimization, you don’t necessarily need to have a site of a certain type to take advantage of the traffic potential. For example, having a wiki isn’t a necessary prerequisite to getting traffic from wikis. But bloggers love to link to and from other bloggers, and this is as true in the poker niche as in any other niche. So either launch a poker blog on a subdomain or in a subfolder of your main poker website, or launch a poker blog on its own domain.

Post to your poker blog at least five times a week. Consistent posting keeps people visiting your poker blog regularly. Just by maintaining a regular posting schedule, you give your poker blog a certain amount of legitimacy and trust. (What’s more likely to be a “real” poker blog? A poker blog that updates one to three times a month, or a poker blog that updates every day Monday through Friday.) This will also have the added benefit of being good for your SEO.

Have a blogroll. A blogroll is a list of other blogs that you like to read. Be thoughtful about this and link to poker blogs you’re really going to read on a regular basis. Five poker blogs is plenty for a blogroll, but there’s nothing wrong with having more. Guinness and Poker links to over 100 poker blogs from his blogroll. And don’t worry about losing SEO juice or PageRank from having a large list of sites in your blogroll. Just focus on linking to good quality poker blogs that you believe in.

Write about and comment on other people’s blog posts on your blog. Be sure to link to the specific poker blog posts you’re writing about. The other poker bloggers will begin to notice your referrals in their referral logs. Some of them will link to you from their blog rolls, and some of them will start writing about blog posts that you’re writing. You don’t have to make every post on your blog relate to what someone else is talking about, but you should do this from time to time.

Comment on other people’s blog posts. Make thoughtful and constructive comments on other bloggers’ posts. Don’t keyword stuff your anchor text; you’ll just look like a spammer. Engage in conversations with other bloggers on a regular basis, and when you do leave a comment somewhere, give it some meat. Two sentences is better than five words. Five sentences is a paragraph. Multiple paragraphs can make for an excellent comment.

SEO others’ blog posts. Repetition of keyword phrases is a big search engine ranking factor. So if you’re commenting on other people’s blog posts, help them to rank better by mentioning and repeating their keyword phrases in your comments. Don’t be artificial or arbitrary about this. Just keep it in mind while you’re commenting. By helping them rank better, you’ll get more referral traffic from the links in your comments.

Don’t even think about or worry about whether or not the other bloggers nofollow their comment links. You’re not engaged in an SEO activity here. You’re engaged in social media optimization. Your goal is to get traffic and referrals from other blogs, not PageRank or anchor text. Suppose you make 5 comments a week on 5 different poker blogs every week for a year. You’ve created 25X52 = 1300 new ways to receive traffic from other blogs. If you only get 1 referral per month from each of those comments, you’ll see an extra 40 visitors per day to your site. But if you’re doing it right – helping to SEO these other blogs’ posts, linking to these other posts from your own site, etc, you should see a lot more than 1 referral per comment per month.

Treat your blog optimization strategy as if it’s important. In other words, be consistent, set goals, and give your activities thought and care. You could easily run a website that doesn’t rely on search engine traffic at all using this strategy alone. And if you combine it with other social media strategies, it can become even more powerful. But if you get lazy, spammy, and thoughtless with your strategy, it won’t work well at all. Leaving 25 comments on 25 different blogs per week that all say, “Nice post! I agree.” isn’t social media optimization; it’s spam.

Create your own query phrases. If you start talking about a particular phrase on your blog, and if you mention that phrase in comments on other people’s blogs, then people will eventually start to search for those phrases. The practical use of this fact is obvious – you create popularity for a phrase that you can easily rank for, then you put up content which ranks for it. For example, “poker seo” probably gets a lot more search traffic now than it did two years ago. That’s largely because I launched a site about the subject and so did Steve Badger. You don’t have to stop with one phrase though. I could also start trying to get people talking about the phrase “poker social media optimization” and see traffic from that phrase via the search engines. (More about query spaces.)

What about microblog optimization? Twitter is an example of a microblogging platform. I’ll eventually write an entire post specifically devoted to using Twitter as part of your poker social media optimization strategy, but for now, I’m going to give some simple advice: participate. Follow people on Twitter who you think are interesting. Engage in conversations with those people. Re-tweet their tweets, especially when they’re trying to promote their content. They’ll do the same for you.

The overlying theme of all of the articles I’m writing about social media optimization for poker websites is simple. Participate intelligently in online communities, and you’ll receive large amounts of traffic from social media sources. Take a cheap, lazy, and spammy approach to social media optimization, and you’ll see poor results.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 8:10 am and is filed under Poker Blog SEO, Social Media, Twitter . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.