This “Texas Holdem SEO” post is related to a post about “online poker SEO” that I wrote a little over a week ago. In that post, I provided an example of the kind of competitive research I do when I’m targeting a particularly competitive phrase. In that case, I was looking at the phrase “online poker”. I’m going to repeat the process here for the phrase “texas holdem”.
How competitive is Texas holdem SEO?
A quick search for allintitle:”online poker” in Google shows over 10 million sites with that phrase in the title tag. A search for allintitle:”texas holdem” brings back 9.6 million results. The tentative conclusion that I’m drawing is that doing SEO for the phrase “Texas holdem” is probably going to be just about as hard as it would for the phrase “online poker”. But there’s more to competitive research than that.
In the first ten results for the phrase, I see that the title tags of seven of the results begin with the words “Texas holdem”. Looking at today’s results for “online poker”, nine out of ten begin with “online poker”. So one edge I could probably get over at least three of the top results for a Texas holdem search is to begin my title tag with the phrase. (I don’t think I’m revealing a big SEO secret by saying that the most important words in the title tag should come first.)
I do see a major difference in the SERPs for the “Texas holdem” phrase though. Of the top ten results, only two of the rankings belong to an online cardroom, and they both belong to the same online cardroom (PokerStars). My tentative conclusion is that Texas holdem SEO will be a little less competitive as a result. No one has more resources to use toward ranking for a phrase than an online cardroom, so the online cardroom sites’ lack of rankings tells me they’re not trying very hard. (Or maybe they’re just not good at SEO.)
In fact, four of the top ten results don’t even belong to what I’d consider poker portals. The Wikipedia is a social media encyclopedia, Facebook is a social networking service, and two other sites are just free game websites. So out of ten results, only four belong to actual poker portals. And of those, two results are general poker portals. The other two poker portals in the rankings for “Texas holdem” are entire sites devoted to the game itself. My initial tentative conclusion is that an entire site devoted to Texas holdem should rank well if SEO’ed effectively.
The two Texas holdem sites have the following number of pages each:
- 2290
- 3390
Like I pointed out in my online poker SEO post, one of the first steps toward ranking well for this phrase would be to build a large content site.
How do you do Texas holdem SEO?
The same way you would do “online poker SEO”. Build a large content site about Texas holdem and get links to it. Do standard on-page SEO and don’t do anything to get yourself penalized.
The thing to keep in mind is that this is not such a difficult phrase to rank for that you should avoid it. It might take a year or so, but ranking for “Texas hold’em is an achievable goal, if you’re committed.
If you need help, let me know. I’m available for Texas holdem SEO consulting and I offer poker link building services.
Randy, if you attempted to rank for [Texas Holdem], do you think that you would inadvertently end up ranking for the other possible searched variants like [Texas Hold em] and [Texas Hold'em]?
If not, do you think that including variants of the term in your text and varying your incoming links (where possible) would allow you to rank for all 3 terms? This is after putting in the equal amount of effort it would take to rank for just the one?
So (hypothetically speaking), instead of getting 100 links with “Texas Holdem” in there somewhere, mixing up you text and getting 33 with “Texas Holdem”, 33 with “Texas Hold em” and 34 with “Texas Hold’em”. Do you think you would see poorer results across the board than if you just focused on the one variant?
I’m sure Google has some understanding related to variations of certain phrases. For example, if you do a search for “Texas hold’em”, you’ll notice that “Texas holdem” is bolded in the title tag and description for some of the pages. That being said, I think it would be natural to see those same variations in your anchor text. If 35% of the people on the Internet spell “Texas holdem” when they’re doing a search, and 50% of them search for “Texas hold em”, and 15% search for “Texas hold’em”, then if you were programming the search engine, you’d expect natural link anchor text to reflect similar percentages.
I don’t spend a lot of time trying to get other people to link to me with the anchor text that I want though. I always just ask them to link to me with whatever anchor text THEY think is appropriate. That way I’m not involved in the anchor text decisions, and I never have to worry about an unnatural backlink profile. (i.e. my anchor text profile IS natural, because I let the owners of the sites choose it.)
So no, I don’t think you’d see poorer results across the board. I think you’ll get partial credit for all 3 variations no matter which variation gets used.
Thanks Randy, much appreciated. The point about the frequency of the different natural link anchors reflecting the search terms is so logical.
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