The most common way for poker webmasters to find targets for their linkbuilding strategy is to research who’s linking to your competitors. Here’s why I think that strategy sucks:

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Mistakes, Poker Link Building . 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.