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When developing the concept or theme of your gambling affiliate web site, in terms of optimizing it for search engines, it is important to set a few basic goals. These goals usually consist of one or more objectives that can bring value to your target audience of new players and potential online gamblers.

Here are some examples of basic goal setting for a gambling affiliate site:
• To provide up-to-date and timely news, trends and information related to playing casino and poker games
• To provide reviews, ratings and feedback of online casinos and poker rooms for players
• To provide bonuses, incentives and other rewards based on loyalty to new players
• To provide tools, strategy and playing tips for increasing player winnings
• To provide a community for gamblers to exchange ideas, share experiences and mentor new players

A common mistake that many gambling affiliates make when first starting out is not setting any proper goals for their web project, besides the most obvious one of “making truckloads of money”. Without setting some basic “player-oriented” goals, like those listed above, it can become quite easy to get spread too thin, doing too many unfocused tasks, and chances are, if you are confused about your gambling affiliate site, then the search engines will be too!

Hence, in the interests of making your site valuable to your visitors, link partners as well as to the complex ranking algorithms of search engines, set some goals for your content and CENTER them around delivering an improved gambling experience for your players. No matter what elements you use to generate new players, whether its text, graphics, videos, tools or other media, as your gambling affiliate site grows in time, with proper goal setting from the start, you’ll pave the way to higher traffic, better SEO rankings and ultimately, more new players!
Looking for the best advice on setting goals for improving your gambling affiliate site SEO? Join the GAM Inner Circle here, and get expert suggestions on proper SEO goal setting and much, much more!

In the second part of a two part series on Gambling Affiliate Marketing SEO tips, the GAM blog presents three more suggestions for improving your search engine optimization.

GAM SEO TIP #4

Identify “Authority Sites” for external linking

Although people that link to your gambling affiliate site will not affect your site’s credibility or search engine results pages, who you choose to link to, can have an impact, which is why is crucial to select “Authority sites” or sites that rank high organically in search engines. An ideal suggestion is to add one or two outbound links using a relevant anchor text, on each page of your site. Avoid using tags like “nofollow” because you want search engine bots to follow these links outbound, and for your site to be associated with that destination. Also, when developing content, it’s a good idea to do a preliminary google search for the target keywords in your content, and identify a non-competitor that ranks well for the term, and create an external link to them. These strategic outbound links will enhance your site’s credibility by citing valuable sources and being relevantly linked to high ranking non-competing authority sites.

GAM SEO TIP #5

Craft your meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the snippets of off-page code that you can find when you view a page’s source code. The meta descriptions are usually located near the top of each coded page, often indicated by a tag that looks like . Many search engines look at the meta descriptions to determine the theme of your site, as well as provide information about your site in search engine results. For example, if you are searching “Online Poker Rooms, Accept US bets”, the search engine results you’ll see will have those keywords in bold. Accordingly, you can also bold the partial phrase such as (online poker rooms) in the title of your page and in the URL as well, to emphasize these keywords to the search engines.

GAM SEO TIP #6

Use Consistent Internal Canonicalisation

Websites can contain more than one URL for example, http://www.gamblog.com and http://gamblog.com. If you have been around while on the internet, there will likely be some people linking to your www. or straight URL. Hence, it is important to designate a primary URL, so you can enjoy the complete benefits of all people that link to you in either link formation. This is easily done by using a tool such as Google’s Webmaster Central, and in the tools section, designate the www. or the straight URL as your primary. Then implement a 301 redirect on the non-primary page to pass on any backlink juice, PR and authority votes that the page contains in relation to the primary page. It is also vital to check internal navigation links to ensure they are point to the correct primary URL. Poor navigation and broken internal links are common with community sites or ones collaborated on with many people. Key point is to choose one URL, and use it constantly throughout your site’s pages.

In this first part of a two-part series, the GAM blog presents gambling affiliate marketing seo tips. Because gambling affiliates and online casinos are prohibited from conducting Pay-Per-Click campaigns on search-engine behemoth, Google, search engine optimization or SEO for gambling related keywords, is one of the most effective strategies to acquiring organic traffic from search engines like Google and others. Here is quick list of gambling affiliate marketing SEO tips, compiled from a variety of remote gaming and online gambling marketing business journals.

GAM SEO TIP #1
Optimize your page titles for search

One of the best elements of overall site optimization is the selection of effective page titles. Search engine algorithms tend to weigh heavy on the relevance value of page titles, and in the beginning stages of your SEO efforts, it is vital to format the page titles of your gambling affiliate site with complete optimization. The best method for optimizing your page titles is to pick your top keyword, and run it through the GAM Competitive Keyword Research Tool, located in the members section of the Inner Circle. From there, you can make informed forecasts for various keyword related factors such as number of queries, demographic and geographic data, annual search trends, competition statistics, among others. From this initial top keyword analysis, it is important to take these results and start classifying them within your gambling affiliate website. Once you have classified the keywords into related clusters for specific pages, you can expand your keyword drilling, to include long tail phrases, until you get down to 4 or even 5 keyword phrases such as “play internet poker freeroll” and “online casino welcome bonus code”.

At this stage, you’ll want to begin mapping out the navigation of the new sections of your site using theme-based threads from top to bottom. In some instances, you can use buffer words to control keyword weighting. For example, if you had the keyword category “online casino” on your home page, a deeper link might be “find online casino” and an even deeper link could be “find online casino in UK” or “Where can I find Online Casino in UK”, if there have been a sufficient queries for that phrase.

If you use an analytics package like Google Analytics or other site analytics such as log file, you can also review traffic referrers of keywords that people are typing in to find your site as well as the search engine they are using.

GAM SEO TIP #2
Key Page Elements for Content Optimization

There are a variety of page elements that can enhance the way search engines rank your website. Once you have optimized your page titles, the next step is content optimization. If you use a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, you can easily optimize the way critical page elements are integrated into the on-page and off-page SEO factors.

Key Page Elements Considerations for Gambling Affiliate Sites

Typically, it is a good idea to keep pages within 250 words of relevant and themed content. In addition, it is important to note that if you have an existing gambling affiliate site, there are still many “extras” that you can use to improve your web visitor interaction. A community section, a “widget” type RSS news feed, or players forum can do much to improve your inbound and outbound links.

As a saavy gambling affiliate in the online poker vertical, it’s important to know where players congregate and talk shop about online poker. An ideal place to find where a great deal of poker players meet online is in internet poker forums. The Gambling Affiliate Marketing Showdown, is a special feature we have here at the GAM blog, where we use freely available web analytics tools to measure and research gambling affiliate marketing information, trends and new developments in related traffic.

Let’s start today’s showdown with a little tech talk. To simulate a random search as much as possible, we used Google to search for the keyword “poker forum”. Results may vary, and the top 3 ranked sites were:

Ranked #1 for keyword “poker forum” — The Poker Forum

Ranked #2 for keyword “poker forum” — CardsChat

Ranked #3 for keyword “poker forum” — Two Plus Two Forum

Now let’s use Compete Site Analytics to triangulate these online poker forums traffic and acquire some interesting marketing information!

People Count

Attention Daily

Pages per Visit

Velocity

Today’s champion of the Gambling Affiliate Marketing Showdown : Battle of the online poker forums is Two Plus Two Forum

Two Plus Two Forum took all 3 categories of People Count, Daily Attention and Pages per Visit. CardsChat gets honorable mention for the highest velocity during the past 45 days.

With a monthly subscription to the Gambling Affiliate Marketing Inner Circle, we’ll walk you through using Compete and other web 2.0 analytics tools to conduct in-depth research into gambling traffic, keywords and optimization. To learn more about The Inner Circle, visit here.

According to a recent email announcement by Yahoo! Search Marketing to all U.K. advertisers, a new change in gambling PPC advertisement policy has become effective in May 2008, that allows casinos and affiliate advertisers to issue ads which were previously prohibited. Today, gambling PPC affiliates may feature PPC ads that contain invitations for gambling, as well as the mentioning of money, bonuses and prizes that could be won through gambling. This new gambling affiliate marketing development has opened up a huge opportunity for gambling affiliates to buy traffic through Yahoo! Pay-Per-Click search marketing campaigns in the United Kingdom.

The update to Yahoo! editorial policy that allows gambling to be promoted in ads displayed through their search marketing platform is in-line with local UK legislation permitting the advertisements of gambling establishments. This is a big win for gambling affiliate marketing in the UK. Here are more details about the email sent by Yahoo!:

• Previously, gambling ad copy could not contain invitations to play or any mention of money, bonuses and prizes. Under recent UK legislation on gambling advertising, UK gambling ads may now include any or all of these. This new legislation does not however extend to gambling advertising in Northern Ireland or Republic of Ireland, and so the relaxation on ad copy restrictions applies only for advertising which is run in mainland UK.
• Advertisers are responsible for blocking any regions within the market where their ad copy is not compliant with local gambling advertising legislation. Because the laws on gambling advertising are different in Ireland and Northern Ireland, as an advertiser with gambling ads on UKIE properties, you must use your geo-targeting settings to block non-compliant ad copy in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
• The existing rules on responsible advertising continue to apply, and gambling ads may be rejected on the grounds that they:
  • Lead people to adopt styles of gambling that are unwise
  • Are socially irresponsible and/or encourage excessive gambling
  • Exploit the young, the immature or those who are mentally or socially vulnerable.
• The existing rules on location and licensing of gambling advertisers also continue to apply.

While Yahoo! takes the initiative to cash in on the lucrative gambling PPC market in the UK, search-engine giant, Google, continues to prohibit any form of gambling promotion, including play money websites and play for fun destinations. Could Yahoo! become THE gambling pay-per-click engine of choice for casino and gaming affiliates? For now it is, in the United Kingdom.