I’ve been on a 3 month or so hiatus from blogging about poker SEO, but I’m back, at least temporarily. (Which means I’ll start writing about poker SEO again until I get bored with it.) Today I’m going to post an SEO review of a website called All Vegas Poker. I exchanged emails with Doug there a few months ago, and he told me that if I thought his site was interesting enough, I was welcome to write about it. And of all the poker seo site reviews I’ve been asked to do, All Vegas Poker is one of the more interesting sites I’ve been asked to take a look at.
The first thing I notice about AllVegasPoker.com is that when I go to the homepage, I’m not instantly confronted by dozens of affiliate ads for online cardrooms. From an SEO perspective, this is a brilliant move, because it enables a site like AllVegasPoker.com to receive good quality editorial links from other sites – particularly sites from outside the inbred “online poker” community. If you really want to compete as a poker website, differentiating yourself from the other poker sites out there is one of the best ways to do so. The only ad for an online poker site on the homepage is subtle and low-key. My guess is that it gets more clickthroughs and better conversions than most “top ten poker site” lists on other portals, and it doesn’t detract from the credibility of the site.
The next aspect of the All Vegas Poker SEO efforts is the design of the homepage. It’s completely clear what this website is about from the minute you hit the site. “All Vegas Poker provides poker room reviews, tournament schedules, and news for poker players visiting Las Vegas, Nevada.” is emblazoned across the top of the page. It’s keyword rich, descriptive, and right at the beginning of the page. I can’t imagine a more user-friendly or SEO-friendly way to start the content of the homepage of this site on.
Much of the content on their site is user-generated. This is brilliant from an SEO perspective, because it will enable the managers of the site to expand the content by looking closely at the site’s referral logs. People search for phrases which you’d never imagine, and the nice thing about user-generated content is that people will write and use phrases you’d never imagine too. Like peanut butter and chocolate, that’s a winning combination.
I don’t have a lot of recommendations for what Doug can do to improve the SEO on this site. That’s because the SEO and content on the site are already done extraordinarily well. This is an example of the kind of poker portal that people should strive for: a unique resource for an underserved but traffic heavy niche. It’s actually a big treat to be able to review the SEO on a poker site that’s so well done.
But I do have one recommendation. The “About” page could be displayed more prominently, and the content on that particular page could be more robust. People don’t like anonymous websites or web pages, and the best way to avoid being anonymous is by providing lots of detail (even pictures of the site’s authors) on the about us page. And then make that about us page easy to find.