The title may be deceiving because the actual “Top 20 Poker SEO Tips” is a matter of opinion, so the best I can do is give the first 20 that come to mind when I am planning or working in a websites. The great thing about Poker SEO and Search optimization in general is that it is never too late to fix mistakes. Also, the more you practice the better you will get. Take a look at your very first website, and the website you build last and I bet you were able to use your experience to avoid many common mistakes you made when you first started out.

Before we get into my “Top 20 Poker SEO Tips” I want to encourage everyone to read through some of the other posts on this site like the “Give Yourself a Plan” post and the post on “5 SEO Mistakes“. Remember you do not have to be an SEO expert to make a good useful website, but you do need to make sure you are providing a resource for visitors.

Keep in mind as you are reading,t hat doing proper Search Engine Optimization for gambling is not much different from doing SEO for a Fishing site, bowling site, or a movie site. The same principles apply and nobody has magic SEO dust to sprinkle on a website to make it rank #1. It takes good hard work, testing, more testing, and reasearch!.

Poker SEO Tips

1. Plan your website before you build it – This tips seems simple enough, yet all too often I meet new webmasters that have just decided to make a website and throw up banners and links in the hopes of being the next Poker Listings of the world. Do yourself a favor and plan your website BEFORE you build it. Decide if you want to be a Poker News Website, A Poker Bonus Guide Type website, a Rakeback Provider website, Poker Strategy, or all in one type website.

Although I would not encourage the last one, mainly because as a new webmaster your plate will be very full, and as with any task it will be easier to focus if your site is in a defined niche. If you plan your website properly, you can eventually make your website the next “one stop shop”.

2. Think like a visitor – This once again relates to the planning of your website, you website should be able to give the visitor what they are looking for. If they find your site and cannot find what they are looking for, they will hit the “back” button and move on. Some of the other tips listed here will get into greater details on how to accomplish this task, but for now just remember to think like a visitor/customer

3. If you choose a niche, own the niche – Over the last year or two, “mini sites” have become the “in” thing to do. The disappointing thing is that most webmaster think a 4-5 page website covers a niche and then they move on. To me a mini site is a site with less than 100 pages and revolves around a few select topics.

Example – I am working in covering the SE’s for all things relating to Double or Nothing Tournaments, from that one topic I can think of dozens of articles to write about. Double or Nothing Strategy, DON Tips, DON Mistakes, DON Bubble Strategy, etc. I’m sure you get the picture. Just remember, if you are going to do a mini site, make sure you own the niche!

4. Write content that makes sense – This is another common issue I come across, everywhere you look when reaearching and trying to learn SEO, you see and hear over and over that KW density is crucial. The results is webmaster stuffing Keyword sin places where they don’t appear natural. Remember your content should be for the visitors benefit and not for the SE’s

5. Get a good domain name – A choice you have to make early is if you are going to have a brandable domain name, or a KW domain name. Obviously you can sometimes have both, but some of the combo domains are very pricey. I recommend that if you are going to have a poker news website, you try and get a domain with that in it, same for rakeback, bonuses, etc. If you decide to go more brandable, which is a great choice as well, then make sure you get a .com, and make sure its not super long Randybestpokerbonusawesoemness.com <—- way too long obv

6. Plan your URL structure – This is another area of Poker SEO which is either ignored or over done by Poker webmasters. You website should have a good structure which will be friendly to SE’s and visitors. I recommend sub folers for various sections of your site. Example – website.com/pokerstars/ (Bad) website.com/poker/reviews/pokerstars/ <– Good. Example #2 website.com/bonus/pokerstars Also notice this gives you another opportunity to expand your content which will gain you more KW’s and more Longtail search traffic

7. Title Tags - As I hope everyone knows already, your title tags are very important in Poker SEO. Make sure your pages have a proper title tag which is descriptive of the page, and is the main Kw’s you are targeting for the pages.

8. Meta Description and KW’s – I keep hearing that since google said they didn’t pay attention to these anymore, then there is no point in using them. I think too many people overlook that #1 Google is not the only SE and #2 Google at times DOES use your Meta Data as your page description in the SERP’s.

9. Use Htags, scanable content - Try to include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can but keep in mind it doe nto have to be exactly same as title of your page. You can use (H1 H2 H3, etc) tag for specifying anything important.  To reduce size of heading use CSS. This is also a great thing for your reader, it makes your content scanable and saves reader time and allows them to quick look over your content which gives you a chance to grab their attention!

10. Use a real nav menu instead of script or images – With the web 2.0 or 3.0 (w/e they are calling it now) I’m seeing very design heavy websites with way too many images. Be sure and use a nice simple menu that is well organized

11. Don’t Use the anchor text “home” all over your website – Home is a horrible anchor text for any website, there is better alternatives to doing this, and keep in mind interlinking between your pages to essential for visitors and SE’s love good structure. Feel free to test out different anchors.

12. Don’t make a website that takes more than 5-7 seconds to fully load – Again this is great for some sites or hobby sites. Generally if a visitor has to wait more than 5 second that chance of them hitting the back button increases greatly. Graphics are great, but make sure the images are optimized to load fast. There are tons of tools to help you check your site’s loading speed and also to help optimize your images. All the Poker SEO in the world won’t help if your visitors leave before you can sell them on anything.

13. Vary your Keywords for different phrases – As you can see in this article, sometimes I use the term “Poker SEO” and Other Times I say Search Engine Optimization. Apply that same tip to your website. Poker > Texas Hold’em, Hold’em, Hold’em Poker, etc

14. Use the Image ALT tags – This is not as big of a deal as it was a few years back, but be sure and use the “ALT” tag in your images and name them something specific that related to the page it is on.

15. Use Google Webmaster Tools – These tools are free to use and will give you a ton of info such as, Page Error, missing URL’s, you can upload a sitemap, check for site links, crawl issues, etc. Don’t ignore free information!

16. Include The Keywords you are targeting on the home page – This is one that seems almost stupid to mention, but time and time again I look at people website and they think they are targeting Rakeback or bonuses, and yet the actualy KW is only mentioned once or twice on the entire page. To seriously go after a KW you need to have content about it, not a 100 page, you need 1000 words on the subject. Example: If I have a website about rakeback, I’m going to talk about the best rakeback offers, what rakeback is, how to get rakeback, why you should get rakeback, etc. Seems simple, but make sure you are including info on yoru home page for what you are targetting.

17. Try and get some links from fellow webmasters – There will always be a big debate among the Poker SEO experts about the important and the nessecity of tons of links pointing to your website. Personally I would rather have 10 quality links (Quality has nothing to do with Age or Page Rank) then 100 spammy forum sig links, blog comment links, etc.

A great way to get links is to just ask. It can really be that simple. Also remember that you need to offer links as linking out to quality websites will not hurt your Poker Search Engine Strategy. Contributing to webmaster forums like PAL, GPWA, or AGD will put you in contact with other webmasters and everything will fall into place form there.

18. Create a Solid Resource Page – As I mentioned above getting quality links back to your site is important. I never recommend buying links and trust me when I say that it is necessary. A great thing to do is to create a solid “Poker Directory” section on your website in place of the more spammy looking “Links Page”. Make sure this page is content rich and is an actual resource rather than a page with 50 links on it which will nto do anyone any good.

19. Create a Section on your website that will be update often – Getting visitors from the SE’s is great, but you also want something to keep visitors loyal. You can accomplish this by have a small weekly news article, a weekly strategy article, a bonus of the week section, etc. Give the visitors something to come back for. Pages like this will also get you some good links form visitors posting it in forums if the content is good enough ot be passed on.

20. Use the K.I.S.S Method - In case you don’t know, KISS stands for “Keep it Simple Stupid”. This one should explain itself, don;t try to be fancy, don’t try and game the search engine, just create good content that you think will be valuable to other people. Do not worry about having 13% KW density, or how many spam blog links you can hustle. Just keep it simple and do good honest work and you will reap the rewards.