Poker SEO - Poker Writer
Randy
Ray used to be the owner and operator of Poker Tomorrow, and he is also the
author of most of the content on the site. Randy grew up in a small
town in northeast Texas with his mom and dad and brother and sister.
He's been playing games and reading voraciously since he was seven
years old. The first card game he remembers playing is spades, which
he played two-handed with his mom, and he also played a lot of
solitaire when no one else was available to play cards with.
In the early 1990's, Randy Ray attended UNT, where he earned a Literature degree. He'd originally planned to teach school, but found out he had a knack for sales and pursued that career for the next ten years. Most of his career was spent at Hotels.com, where he worked in multiple departments, including a year spent as an affiliate manager.
In 2003 Randy read Poker Nation by Andy Bellin and decided to learn how to play poker. Since then he's played poker online at most major online cardrooms, and live in at least a dozen poker cardrooms in Las Vegas. He used to play in some of the underground games in the Dallas area, but now he just drives to Oklahoma if he feels like playing live poker.
Randy Ray works on websites full time, writing content. He was also in charge of the SEO efforts for the largest poker site on the Internet, PokerStars.com, for a period of fifteen months, during which time he tripled search engine referrals to the main website. (Traffic to the .net site quadrupled during that period too, and PokerStars still ranks for the most competitive poker-related keyword phrases on the Internet, including "poker", "free poker", "online poker", "poker games", and "texas holdem".
Randy doesn't play much poker any more, but he stays current on issues within the industry. He still spends a good portion of his day reading and writing about SEO in general, and he also maintains multiple informational websites in a variety of industries.