I’ve had a couple of people write in asking me to review their site’s SEO strategies. I hope these comments are helpful:
Chris wrote to me 2 weeks ago asking for some feedback on his site. I apologize that it took me so long to get to it. Here are my thoughts on the site’s SEO:
- The site ranks #3 in Google already for the target phrase, which is obviously “carbon poker rakeback”. I’d imagine the site is benefiting quite a bit from the exact match domain, but with a little bit of authority, it could probably be #1 fairly easily.
- Looking at the title tag of the homepage, I wonder why multiple versions of the words aren’t used instead of just repeating the words over and over. I’d use the word “rakeback”, but I’d also use the phrase “rakeback”. I’d use the phrase “carbon poker”, but I’d also use the word “carbonpoker”.
- The homepage doesn’t really have much in the way of content on it. The more content you put on the page, the wider the variety of phrases the page can rank for. Adding content to this page should be a no-brainer too: just include information about who Carbon Poker is, what rakeback is, and who owns this particular site.
- The entire site is very impersonal, especially the “About Us” page. That’s going to make it harder to get natural links, which help you rank better. Put up a picture on the About Us page. Tell us the name of your company. Why would I link to this anonymouse site, and why would I sign up through this anonymous site? Trust matters for SEO, because it affects linking, and it also affects conversions.
- The actual review of Carbon Poker is pretty weak. For example, in the 1st paragraph, the review tells me that this is the largest room on the “Merge Network”. Well, who is this “Merge Network”? This might seem like a content issue, but content issues ARE SEO issues. Because you want good quality links.
- You could easily add a blog to this site and update it several times a week and dramatically increase the number of phrases you rank for and the links you could get.
The SEO on the site is “okay”, but it seems like a throwaway site that no one will link to, and it seems like a site that offers no real value to a visitor.
I’m not going to provide a very detailed review for this site, but I would like to point it out as an example of a site that’s focused on its content rather than on its advertising. It’s a useful site full of specific advice on a specific type of online poker game. I think this is the kind of site that will easily generate links. I like that the site doesn’t have any advertising yet, or any lame generic reviews of online poker rooms.
If you have a poker site you’d like to see reviewed here, then let me know, and if and when I get time, I’ll write something up for you here.
Thanks for taking time to review my site Randy. It looks like I still have a long way to go with my site. Right now it is converting okay but I do agree with you that I don’t think it provides any real value other then a rakeback offer which is sorry on my part. I am in the process of beefing up the homepage right now and will also be going back through the room review to make it worth reading. Right now I have a promotions section where I post up the new promotions at Carbon, for a blog would you suggest putting something on the homepage linking to a blog about Carbon Poker? I will take a look at what you are talking about on the title tag. Thanks for reviewing my first mini site and I will be turning this site into a keeper vs. a throwaway site.
Nice write up Randy. Just to show that not all poker webmasters are link-hogs and that good content will be linked to, I have linked to Super Turbo Poker Tips from my page that happens to rank #1 on Google for “super turbo strategy”. You have a very nice site #2.
Keep up the good work all three of you.
Nick- I think that’s so awesome, Nick! Maybe you and I can start a trend of link generosity as it relates to good quality poker content on the Internet.
Chris- I would link to the blog, but I don’t know how specific to “Carbon Poker” I’d make it. I’d mix up the posts with a mixture of poker news, poker tips, and Carbon Poker specific observations. One of the nice things about having a blog is that it’s a great way to generate links to and from your site in a very natural way. http://www.wordskit.com/blog/writing/50-useful-blogs-for-writers/ is an example from one of my other sites where I linked out to a lot of people, and a lot of them linked back. Since writing that post, the traffic on that site has gone from ~10 per day to about ~50 per day. (And I haven’t made any other changes to the site…)
Randy
Adding a blog never crossed my mind. I think I was stuck with the idea that a mini site would target a keyword and have about 5-10 pages of content. My goal with the site is to get the most conversions for people wanting rakeback at Carbon Poker. When setting up the site I didn’t think adding more pages or even a blog would help me do this. I am adding more information to the site and making the homepage more user friendly with lots of useful information which I hope will help my conversions. I will also be adding a blog and adding about 3 articles per week. I’ll post here again when I have revamped the site. Thanks again.
Absolutely Randy. I think something that poker webmasters need to understand is that linking out can actually IMPROVE your rankings. Some of my best ranking pages (in tough niches) link out to quality resources that add insight or extra depth what I have written on the topic.
I think so many webmasters have been so conditioned by “authorities” like seoMOZ that bottling link juice is next to godliness, that they don’t even consider linking to other sources when writing. I have found the exact opposite to be true time and time again.
Hi admin,
Very short but a good piece of small SEO review of poker website. If you don’t mind then I would like to have detailed SEO reviews which can be published on my review site.
Great post! really helpful. I agree with you about making a site personal!
iv tried to come across like a friend to my readers and always welcome potential players to contact me if they have any quires, but i tend to get more AM’s contacting me than actual players
@nick “I think something that poker webmasters need to understand is that linking out can actually IMPROVE your rankings.” I never knew that, thanks for the heads up!
Regards.
Blair.H
Hey Randy,
Any chance we can get you to do a mass question and answer session? Maybe even some sort of continual blog post with Q & A? Or perhaps you can choose the best questions for a blog post and give simple answers to the others?
Just throwing some ideas around
Hazo-
I’d be thrilled to do that if people are interested. Spread the word and have people post their questions here in the comments.
Rady
OK Randy spreading the word
Question #1 – How does your competitors behaviour influence how you operate your site? Do you go through how they operate their sites with afine comb and work out where they are lacking and improve your site in that area? What do you do with a brand new site in a niche where you are struggling against all the aged sites with heaps of links?
Hey guys! I’d love to hear our thoughts on the value of .edu links…and any suggestions you might have on how to attain them. Any tricks you might let us in on?
Thanks…and thanks for the great site!
Jess
How important is loadtime, and when should I be concerned about it?
Hi Randy, Question # 2 – I posted a thread at pokeraffiliatelistings http://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com/forums/poker-seo-forum/3744-meta-keywords-should-they-used.html about whether one should use meta tag keywords or not – like just about everywhere else I looked there seems to be a lot of mixed opinions on it. What’s your opinion on it.
Thanks,
Barry.
Barry-
I don’t use meta keywords myself, but I don’t see any real harm in it. I usually optimize for Google, and I don’t think Google uses them at all, but other search engines (like Yahoo) pay some attention to the tag.
Hope that helps.
Randy
Unknown-
Load time is extremely important from a user perspective, and I suspect from an SEO perspective too. I’m less likely to link to a slow-loading site, and I think some other webmasters are the same way. And I think if your pages are so large that they load slow, it’s going to take longer for a search engine to crawl your pages. When you’re crawling as many pages as Google does every day, you’re probably going to focus your energy on pages that take less time to crawl rather than more.
Randy
Jess-
.edu links are like any other link. If it’s a high-quality page on a high-quality site with a lot of trust and authority, then it’s going to be a really good link. But there’s no intrinsic advantage to a .edu link over any other kind of link. It’s just that .edu sites and pages tend to have more authority and trust because of the barrier to entry.
Randy
Hazo-
I don’t pay much attention to my competitors. I just run my sites as best I can. When I do look at competitors’ sites, it’s as much for keyword phrase and topic ideas as anything else. I don’t think I look at anyone’s site with a fin comb though, ever.
With a brand new site in a niche, I make sure that I publish the best possible content, and then I focus on quality links over quantity. You don’t need “heaps” of links; you need heaps of trust and authority. The right links will provide that for you.
Hope that helps.
Randy
Great.
Will you review non english sites? Lol
Cheers Randy, I think I’ll probably leave the keywords element in but I’m not going to be overly concerned about it.
Another question for you. I haven’t engaged on a link building campaign yet. My blog has been up almost 2 months now and it’s still a very small site but its beginning to take shape. The positive(ish) element is as of now I’m no.15 on google.com for my main 3 terms, but the negative element is I installed the google toolbar yesterday and my homepage has a pagerank of 0. I was thinking nonetheless that I should go about doing a link campaign soon, I was thinking about the start of June. My worries are that if I do it too soon and webmasters check my site and see it’s got PR0 they will just dismiss my site and won’t reconsider it in the future. So my question is when do you think a site should start looking for incoming links, link exchanges etc?
Marian-
I don’t know any foreign languages well enough to be able to intelligently review a non english site. I know a tiny bit of German, so I might be able to try to review a German site, but even then, I don’t think that would be very helpful.
Randy
Barry-
The webmasters who matter won’t care about what your toolbar PR says. If the site is “finished”, then go ahead and start building links to it.
Randy
Hey Randy if there aren’t any drawbacks to using keywords and possibly some benefits, why don’t you use them?
Thanks for responding to my question by the way. I was asking more because Ive heard that it is good to get links in the same places are your well established competitors that are ranking well. Also, to see if they are doing anything in particular that is making them rank so well.
Nick
Randy in response to the website loading times. I have read on different SEO blogs where comments like “webmasters have no idea how much of a role the loading time of their site impacts search engines.” This sort of comments lead me to believe that it has a bigger impact that I originally suspected. Does this just work in terms of normal loading > very slow. Or does it go as far to mean a fast loading site will be better off than an average loading site.
Hazo-
I think you’re trying to pin down something very specific here, like if your site loads fast, will it move from #10 to #1 in the rankings. The answer to that is I don’t know.
But I know of NO good reasons to have a slow-loading site, and I know of LOTS of good reasons to have a fast loading site. So I do my best to make sure that my sites load as fast as is reasonably possible.
Randy
Thanks Randy. There’s just a few little things I want to sort out before it’s “finished”. Start of next month is the plan for getting links and other site promotion type stuff.
That Q+A session sounds good Randy. Can we organise it for PAL?
Hi admin.
)
I gues you will not review romanian poker sites , right?
I don’t speak Romanian or read it, so I don’t know what good my review of a Romanian poker site would do. Most of my focus in SEO is how to improve content.