Best SEO Practices for Online Gambling Sites

Best SEO Practices for Online Gambling Sites

Table of Contents Introduction... 3 Stages of an SEO campaign: Keyword research... 4 On-site SEO. Technical issues... 6 Link building... 11 Analytics and tracking... 13

Introduction Before we go into the world of links and keywords and analytics, we must first establish just how tricky the promotion of online businesses is. What are the main obstacles faced by online gambling businesses? Online gambling, or any gambling, is illegal in several countries (e.g. USA (most states), China, Japan, Netherlands, Greece, New Zealand, Turkey and many others (~28 countries)). In the rest of the world gambling is usually not outlawed directly, but rather is an unregulated market which suffers from a shady and risky reputation and is often frowned upon. As a result, the safe target audience for online gambling businesses is reduced to mostly British, French, Russian and Australian men aged 18-40 years old. Bingo games and online slots do target women, but the majority of marketing efforts for now are directed at single males from Gen X, usually sport-lovers with an average income of more than $75,000. So, as they are illegal in many countries, poorly regarded in others and suffer from a very small target audience, gambling businesses have very limited marketing opportunities. TV and printed commercials normally won t run gambling ads and most prominent search engines will charge huge amounts to show them in their paid listings. For instance, a click in Google s AdWords system will cost an online casino from 10 to $80 and only a little less in the content media network, but a content media network will bring very little traffic and is of a poor quality. So what does this leave for gambling businesses? Viral social media campaigns, Word-of-mouth marketing and Search Engine Optimization. As a result, there are millions of online gambling sites and resources that compete over the first 10 positions of Google. So, no exaggerations here we are talking about one of the most competitive niches for SEO.

Below we outline the milestones of an SEO campaign and best practices for gambling sites at every stage. Keyword research Difficulties begin at this early stage. Minimal research will demonstrate that there are very few search queries that promise to bring high traffic. For instance, in the UK most keywords will be searched fewer than 5-6000 times a month. If you include free terms then the search volume increases to around 8,000. What we are most interested in here is the keywords that tend to convert. The general craze nowadays is to look for some magic long tail phrases which will generate twice as much traffic as short tail high volume phrases do, and convert better, as they are very specific to what user wants. However, judging from experience, the in the online casino gambling niche (as well as in many highly competitive commercial niches) long tail is useless in terms of generating traffic. To generate traffic and income, you must rank by the most competitive keywords. So, this is what you must focus on, for results, not long-tail. Many of you will be familiar with the famous Search Demand Curve published by SEOmoz. If we apply this principle to the world of online gambling, it would be safe to say that profit lies here at the Chunky Middle. So, the best choices for keywords in this industry are: uk online casino, internet casino and the like.

Furthermore, it is important not to forget the specific games and the keywords which relate to them such as online roulette, online blackjack, slot machines etc. If you are promoting different versions of your casino for different countries, do try to mind the differences in colloquialism. For example, although English is the language of choice in both the UK and Australia, and English searcher would type in fruit machines for online slots, while an Australian would type online pokies. Long tail keywords can be used to generate more passive traffic or maybe to create a community of some kind. I would suggest creating a blog with relevant, interesting articles about games and gambling news, optimized for long tail key phrases. Blog posts can also be used to drive more link juice to the main landing pages, optimized for conversion of visitors into players.

On-site SEO. Technical issues After defining our focus keyword groups, we need to make sure that those keywords have adequate and well-optimized landing pages and that the site is running smoothly. The most typical technical issues that hamper SEO promotion for gambling sites includes: Overuse of JavaScript and Flash Poor or thin content on the landing pages Navigation in images, flash or java No internal linking whatsoever Slow page loading speeds Incorrect use and overuse of pop-ups and pop-unders Duplicate content issues caused by session IDs, ad IDs or landing pages for PPC campaigns Poor use of redirects, wrong server codes Overuse of JavaScript and Flash. When running an instant, no download casino, the pages of the games themselves are going to be in flash. As Google or any other search crawler has not learnt to decipher it yet, flash page will never rank as high as a static page with text content. Googlebot is not going to hang around and play for a while to decipher what the page is about! To ensure that you have good landing pages with lots of text content which Googlebot and other search engine bots love, we advise you create separate pages with text descriptions of the games at your casino, explaining rules and basic strategies. Such pages will also be very useful for your visitors. Furthermore, do not create a poorly written piece purely for the purpose of cramming in SEO-friendly content, crammed

with keywords but of little relevance to the site. Such and exercise creates very poor user experience and is not recommended! Bad example: It does use lots of keyword-rich text and has useful links to other pages, but is evidently not intended for users! My recommendation here is to create a static page with useful content relevant to the game on offer and include a visible button offering a chance to e play that game:

Poor or thin content on the landing pages. This was partially covered by the previous point, but do not forget your home page, category pages or any other pages you intend to promote in the search engines. Navigation in images, flash or java. Most advanced search engine crawlers are now only learning to read java and recognize the images. However it is not necessary to test their proficiency with you online business. So, please stick to the best practices and use static text links in your navigation. This way all the crawlers can easily discover pages besides the home page and can easily crawl through the most important pages on your site. No internal linking whatsoever. This is closely connected to the previous point. Make sure that SEO bots crawl the pages you want them to crawl, and that they understand the priorities of the pages on your site correctly. Do not follow all the links to ancillary pages (terms of service, privacy policies, user accounts etc.) and instead preserve that link juice for more important pages. Text links on your site are like paths for Googlebot, so make its walk through your site easy and fast, and create text links with relevant anchor texts in order to help it navigate.

Slow page loading speed with all the flash, pop-ups and pop-unders, this is often a severe issue for gambling sites. Again, Google are striving to make their Googlebot behave as humanly as possible, so when every page takes more than two or three seconds to load, Googlebot might grow impatient and simply leave the site. Also, Google uses not just their crawler to determine how fast a site s pages are loaded, but also their Google-toolbar to determine how fast the page is loaded for a specific user, which can be affected by slower connections and glitchy browsers. You can check this user loading speed in your Webmaster Tools account in Labs -> Performance Incorrect use and overuse of pop-ups and pop-unders This should not be a big problem nowadays, but still make sure that with all the pop-ups and popunders or any geo-location by IP, your techniques are not treated by Googlebot as cloaking. This means never create any particular directives on your server-side for Googlebot; Googlebot should be treated as ordinary users are. To be on the safe side, you can hash your page and compare the numbers with what you get after fetching the page as googlebot; the numbers should match. Fetch as Googlebot feature is available in Google Webmaster Tools in Health>Fetch as Googlebot. Duplicate content issues caused by session ID s, ad ID s or special landing pages for PPC campaigns. On gambling sites you often see URLs like - http://www.planet7casino.com/?affid=8472,t=pl86747b19ed4e7f0be70b437992c d7a60,ycid=2,yaid=5486

http://casinograndluxe.com/eng/?sourceid=1054962 and etc. You want to make sure that Google does not index that along with normal URLs. Block such urls with a robots.txt directive in this case a: Disallow: /?* will do; or/and canonicalize all the URLs, put into the code of all the duplicates of a page the string: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.casino-example.com/roulette-games "/> specifying the original page s URL. Poor use of redirects, wrong server codes. If missed, the simple things can cause frustrating results. Make sure that you redirect the site to one canonical version of your choice www or non-www using a permanent 301 redirect. If there are any other old domains or pages that you want to redirect to new ones, make sure not to use a 302 or any other server code. Also, all the non-existent pages are to respond with a 404 server code, not 403, 401 or anything else. As only 404s eventually get deleted from the index of the SEOs, whereas other error messages will be indexed and displayed in the SERPs with error message as title, description and content of the page. When you set a 404 error, please ask your designers to draw a custom 404 page with the logo, layout and navigation of the rest of your site. This way you won t lose players that come to your site by a broken link or who accidentally type some extra characters in your site s URL. Users need to have an option to surf the site further and still find what they ve been looking for.

Link building This is where the online gambling market starts to get particularly tricky. Usually the things that would encourage a person to link to a site are: awesome content and some kind of free giveaways. But, when your site belongs to the 3 P s niche (porn, pills, poker) webmasters are terrified of you! Often they simply won t link to you, no matter how awesome your content is and how many bonuses you are giving out. On top of that, when you start an online gambling business you might feel like the guy trying to sell another black, sweet fizzy drink based on caffeine and coca extract with Coca-Cola and Pepsi out there. In other words, there are so many big gambling companies out there, dominating the top search positions and it may seem impossible to nudge them out. If we take a look at 888.com backlinks, for example, we ll see more than 600 000 of them, and at Bwin.com more than 1 million. Before trying to invent anything in SEO and link-building strategies, always look at what your competitors are doing, at least this is what I do. Look at what those big guys at the top do, because it s quite obviously working for them! If we look at big guys in online gambling, we see massive amounts of bought links. How could they, right? Well, I would not blame them much, because, as we have already discussed there are not many webmasters willing to link to a gambling site: most big directories won t accept a gambling site, articles about casinos will often be declined and too few bloggers will accept a guest post with a link to a casino. I will not focus on buying links, as this is a personal choice for everyone, and this is one of the easiest ways to go about link-building. I would just like to point out that, especially after new Google s algorithmic change, known as Penguin, buying links has become extremely risky. You need to be very shrewd not to get

caught and reprimanded. Remember that while the big guys at the top have lots of bought links, they have also have gained tons of natural trusted links and you can never know what it was that worked for them eventually, tons of paid ones or several highly trusted ones. Fortunately, there are other ways besides link-buying. Tech sites: designers, usability specialists, developers communities and forums, where tons of people submit their sites for review and rating of other community members. Trust me, those geeks will be happy to troll any site be it porn, casino or a blog about kittens. Make use of job boards. This is a good old method that works. It won t allow you to create anchor links but it will give you natural links from quality, trusted sources. Hold give-aways and competitions and offer info about them for publication at niche specific blogs and gambling forums. If you are giving away decent prizes the word about your site will fly throughout the community resulting in lots of decent links. However, stay away from giving out free credits for playing casino games, as this might scare most webmasters away, offer some more universal prizes. Free stuff always works. A great way to spread the word about your site is to create some kind of small and cute flash game, for example, that won t require any gambling for money, just pure fun. Again, don t make it directly related to casinos, but something more universal. You might have noticed that many of the big guys tend to host multiple domains and create blog networks at the same time as their affiliate sites and their little networks for keyword-rich anchor backlinks. Although I would not recommend going for coining poor-quality blogs with a single purpose of manipulating Page

Rank and organic rankings, creating a couple of decent satellite sites can certainly help you. Analytics and tracking Many of you are aware of all the useful reports and data you can find in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools reports, so I won t dwell on them. However, I would urge you to configure your Conversion tracking, as setting Goals should be easy once they are defined A little trickier might be the code of Google Analytics E-commerce tracking implementation. E-commerce tracking code is basically meant for online stores and is not complicated enough to be able to track all the cash flows of a casino, but you can still at least track by what keywords the richest guys and the riskiest players come to your sites as well as which games tend to engage more real money players and so on. What you need to do is: Enable e-commerce tracking in the admin section of your GA account Paste the e-commerce tracking code at your thank you page, leaving only the fields that are required So, a standard full online store code would resemble the following: <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq []; _gaq.push(['_setaccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_trackpageview']); _gaq.push(['_addtrans', '1234', // order ID - required 'Acme Clothing', // affiliation or store name '11.99', // total - required '1.29', // tax '5', // shipping

'San Jose', 'California', 'USA' ]); // city // state or province // country _gaq.push(['_additem', '1234', // order ID - required 'DD44', // SKU/code - required 'T-Shirt', // product name 'Green Medium', // category or variation '11.99', // unit price - required '1' // quantity - required ]); _gaq.push(['_tracktrans']); (function() { var ga = document.createelement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.googleanalytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getelementsbytagname('script')[0]; s.parentnode.insertbefore(ga, s); })(); </script> With lots of parameters, including Product name, category, variation, city of shipping etc. For a gambling site the code should be simple, for instance: <script type="text/javascript"><!-- var _gaq = _gaq []; _gaq.push(['_setaccount', 'UA- XXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_trackpageview']); _gaq.push(['_addtrans', '2622', // Order Id 'Casino-example', // affiliation or store name '10', //total '', //tax '', //shipping '', //city '', // state or province '' // Country ]); _gaq.push(['_additem',

'2622', //Order id 'CA01', // SKU '', //Product name '', // Category or variation '10', // unit price '1' // quantity ]); _gaq.push(['_tracktrans']); (function() { var ga = document.createelement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getelementsbytagname('script')[0]; s.parentnode.insertbefore(ga, s); })(); //--></script> We only fill out the required fields. For variables like SKU which cannot be applied to casino deposits, we set random credits like CA01. Quantity of purchased items will also always equal 1. Store name, total amount, price per one unit and order id are fine with casino deposits. To avoid mis-executions of code and misinterpretations of statistics in GA account, do not forget to leave empty inverted commas for all the optional parameters being skipped. As a result, you will get lots of useful statistics in your Google Analytics account:

You will be able to define the most profitable sources of traffic: And see for yourself exactly which keywords bring more players: Hope that helps. Thank you for reading and please share!