I’ve been getting a ton of topic requests and first off I want to thank everyone for reading and supporting this site. There is literally tons of topics relating to poker websites and “Making Money with Poker Websites” that need to be covered. The point of Poker SEO is to get your website ranking in a competitive position to get “Valuable” traffic that will convert. This seems like a very simple concept but my guess would be 95% or more web masters fail at no only ranking well, but ranking well for terms that will make you money.

What I think most webmaster miss is a few key things:

• If a term is easy to rank for, it probably isn’t worth anything
• Most internet searches are in experienced and you have to tell them what to do
• You don’t need or want to copy what someone else is doing, if you cannot offer anything new, find a new niche

1. Terms worth ranking for: Let’s start with he first one, we have spoke before about keyword research and finding keywords you want to target. But do you know WHY you want to target these phrases? Are you sure they convert well? Will they make you money, and better yet will YOU be able to convert this traffic? I’m positive that with little effort you can rank for a term like “Stupid Poker Room” because nobody SEO’s for this term and there is little competition. There is no competition because either nobody searches for that, or the traffic isn’t valuable. Simple enough?

Of course the obvious question that comes up is: How do I know which KW’s make money? There are a few tools I use to check on KW’s and competition. The first and most trusted tool is Google.com. Yup, google is the best way to check the SERP’s and see what is goign on with that term. Simply search, that’s it, nothing special. See what the competition is for that terms, see how many sites are going after it and how hard. The next tool I like to use is Google Insights, this tool gives you search volume goign back to 2004 and will also show you trends to see if the volume is increasing or decreasing. These two tools alone will get you started, and form there you can follow the bread crumbs.

2. I’m a huge nerd: The second key thing that most of us forget form time to time is that internet users for the most part are not savvy. They have to be told what to do. I recently read a neat article posted here: You are a nerd, visitors are not this is something we must understand. Another great example is my buddy Nick. Nick is a smart guy about my age and plays a lot of poker. The other day he called me wanting a good Rakeback deal at Full Tilt Poker. I sent him a link to one of my websites and told him to signup there. After about 10 minutes he called me back because he had no idea how to signup properly.

To me the pages we easy to follow and at first I was totally confused how he could not understand it. So I questioned him about what was confusing about it, and as a result of that conversation I started rebuilding all my signup pages. It seriously never occurred to me that the signup process was confusing. Now I’m pretty sure it is better than it was. The lesson here is to make sure you have very defined calls to action so as long as the person can read, they can get signed up.

Many webmaster (including my) continue to overlook this crucial issues. It is not enough to get a visitor to your site and wanting to signup, we must ensure all possible questions are answered easily on your page. If not that visitor will hit the back button and find someone who has done a much better job than you at converting them. It is not enough to get visitos to your site, you have to be able to sell them on whatever they were after. If you have a site with good traffic but it isn’t making nay money, then you are either targeting the wrong terms or you are failing to convert them.

3. Same tired shit: This is what I’m really tired of seeing, new and old webmaster doing stupid shit is getting old. I guess it is the nature of the net, but for god’s sake do something original. Webmasters need to try something new to make some serious money. You of course can make money doing the same tired bonus sites or strategy sites. The question you have to ask yourself is if you are really offering anything to a visitor that they can’t find on 1000 other sites. Poker News sites are a dime a dozen now, and having run a successful one myself I would never do it again. Although I made money I knew I would never overtake pokernews.com or cardplayer.com simply because I couldn’t justify trying compete with them. My time was better spent working niches I could dominate so I sold the site and I’m glad I did

The main point though is that if you are a new webmaster, or a webmaster trying to take your business to the next level, then you need to start thinking in terms of “trend setting”. There are still a several ideas I have for new poker related niches that I will one day try. If I can think of several new ways to make money on poker, then I’m sure you can too. There is no reason you have to be a Poker News, Poker Listings, or a 2+2. There are a 100 easier ways to make money in the poker business. So don’t limited yourself to the same old tired shit!