If you are a new poker affiliate, or even an affiliate that has been at it a while, you may find that you are making several easy to fix mistakes. Don’t worry, most of these mistakes are common and you are not the first one or the last one to do it. The one thing you need to get out of this article is the willingness to fix these issues and change the way you think.

You may be asking yourself, “what does this guy know about poker marketing”? That’s a great question that has an easy answer. I have been lucky enough to have some great friends like Randy Ray who runs Poker SEO, and Jeremy Enke who runs Poker Affiliate Listings, and of course Chyrle Kaus who runs Slots Geek. All of these people are brilliant SEO’s and online marketers who have made a ton of money over the years running poker websites, casino websites, and tons of other online business. As with any job, you want to learn from the best and that’s exactly what I’ve spent the last few years doing.

So, let’s get down to business! As I said above, there are some glaring mistakes new poekr affiliates make when starting their websites, and I want to address a few of them and hopefully keep you from making the same mistakes. Over the past few months I have had the pleasure of working with some clients that needed soem SEO help because although their sites looked great, they were not making any real money and they were struggling to rank for any decent keywords.

Poker Affiliate Mistakes

Title Tags – The title tags are one of the most important and one of the most powerful tools you have to rank for various keywords. One of the big issues I see is a websites’ title tags being to vague, or too long. You title tags should be focuses and relevant to the content of the page.

Repeat Title Tags – This goes along with the the first tip, but I felt it needed it’s own section. There are way too many sites that use a CMS (content management system) that do not manually change their title tags and this usually results in several or all their pages having the same title tag. This is bad for SEO for several reasons, as we mentioned above their are one of the most powerful tools you have when it comes to optimizing your websites.

Another issue related to page title is I see is websites putting their website name in the title tag. Unless you have a very good keyword domain like “Online Poker.com” then putting your actual domain name in the url is pretty useless. Visitors will not be looking for your specific domain name, they will be searching for things like “Best Poker Bonus” or “Best Rakeback Offer”, so unless that phrase in in your domain, don’t put your domain name in the title tag.

NOT Finding a Niche – A “niche” is simply an area in the poekr or gaming marketing like “Poker Bonuses” or “Poker strategy”. you need to have a plan for your website BEFORE you launch it and you need tp pick a specific niche that you can dominate and become a resource for. The truth is that there is already a million “Poker Bonus” sites and general “Rakeback” sites. So in order for you to become succesfull you need to find an area that has a need and fill that void in the market.

Having a niche does two things for you:

1. It gives your site a defined purpose and direction. without a specific direction you will find that you are trying to tackle too many areas at once. That is not to say that you cannot have a good strategy site without an bonus offers, but instead of general poker strategy maybe you have a “6 Max Poker strategy website” which is more of a defined niche and will be easier to dominate.

2. Having a niche also allows you to fill a void in the market. A good example is my friend Josh who earlier last year saw a void in the market for an authority site for H.O.R.S.E Poker. HORSE has been becoming more and more popular over the last few years, and although you could find article discussing HORSE on hundreds of websites, there was nto a website dedicated to HORSE or mix game strategy. so, he filled that void and dominates the SERPS for HORSE poker terms.

Not writing good content – this seems like a no brainer, but time and time again you will see websites that look great, are nice web 2.0 looking websites with horrible content. the content is often too short and never gives any real informaiton. When you write content you need to make sure it is somehting that you can put your name on. If you are too embarassed to put your name down as the author, then it should nto be on yoru website.

The bottom line is writing 300 words on “Why Pokerstars is the best place to play poker” will not cut it. There are a thousand other articles just like it, and you need to take it to the next level!  You need to make sure the artcile is complete and ots the best quality it can be. The webmasters that put the extra time and effort into their content will covert players with it.

Not being original - Before you build a new website, you need to ask yourself a simpel question. The question is “What can I offer my visitors that nobody else is offering”? – You need to be able to answer this question because if your plan is to throw up a website and hope somebody lands there and signs up under you, then you need to rethink your strategy. Your website needs to be usful and a resource to anyone that come to it. Do not think that a pretty design will make you money becase it won’t.So, before you spend $300 on a nice website design, make sure you have a plan to fill a specific need of your visitors.