In two previous posts, I’ve written about using social media optimization to drive traffic to poker websites. This is the third post in that series, and it’s not intended to show you how to SEO your own poker forum. It’s intended to show you how to launch a social media optimization campaign that focuses on generating traffic via poker forum and poker message board referrals.

You don’t need your own forum in order to get traffic from other forums. A lot of the strategies and activities involved in doing social media optimization for poker forums and poker message boards are the same as the strategies and activities that are you used when doing social media optimization for poker blogs. But this is one major difference.

Don’t be spammy. I own some forums, and I can spot someone whose only purpose at my forum is to drop links instantly. How to avoid being spammy? If you have a signature link, limit it to one line and to fewer than five words. Use a normal size and color font. Don’t make short, valueless posts like, “I agree.” Don’t link to your own content in every (or even in most) of your forum posts.

Participate in the discussions at the forum. Write lengthy and thoughtful responses to other people’s posts. Be helpful. Answer questions. Ask questions, and give other people the opportunity to feel good about helping you. In other words, become a part of the community by participating there. This takes time and consistency. I try to visit and post at the forums I participate in at least once a day, but I know other webmasters who spend more time on forums than on any other activity. (BingoT has over 3000 posts at Casinomeister and over 2500 posts at WinnerOnline. I would take a different approach toward the way I participate in the forums from the one T does, but the consistency with which he’s worked his social media optimization plan is worth emulating.)

Don’t worry about whether or not signature links are allowed. If signature links aren’t allowed, you can still benefit from forum participation as a means of driving traffic to your poker site. The easiest way to do so is to use the name of your site as your handle on the message board. For example, I used to own a site called Unknown Poker. If I participate in forum threads, and if I’m interesting and pique people’s curiosity, then people are going to search for me. Some of them will just type “unknownpoker.com” into their browser window, while others will use Google, Bing or Yahoo to search for the phrase “unknown poker”.  Since that site ranks #1 in all 3 major search engines for that phrase, I can count on significant traffic from people searching for me.

Create new query spaces you can dominate. I talked about this in the article about blogs as a means of driving traffic, but it applies to forums too. If you rank for an obscure phrase that you want people to search for more often, then find ways to bring that phrase up in forum and message board posts too. Suppose you’re a “poker seo” competitor, and you’ve registered the domain “pokerseotechniques.com”.  (It’s available by the way, so knock yourself out.) Rather than trying to outrank me for the phrase “poker seo”, start mentioning “poker seo techniques” when you’re participating at PAL, GPWA or PAP. You could even mention the phrase in your signature line, without linking it back to your page. Eventually people are going to start searching for “poker seo techniques” and find you. (More about creating new query spaces.)

SEO the forum threads where you participate. Again, you can do this by being cognizant of what keyword phrases are relevant to that forum thread and repeating them in your posts. You can also SEO forum threads by linking to them from your site. If the forum threads where you participate get more traffic, then you’ll get more referral traffic from those threads.

Social optimization strategies all boil down to participation in online communities. It’s not rocket science. In fact, it’s pretty easy to pull off. And if you’re willing to make a concerted and structured plan for accomplishing this, then you can drive a lot of traffic to your poker site just by participating in discussions on poker forums.

See also: How to Get Poker Traffic from Social Networking Sites

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 8:39 am and is filed under Poker Forum SEO, Social Media . 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.