As everyone in the online marketing game knows, SEO has evolved rapidly in the past few years from a fairly simple and straightforward way to funnel traffic to your site, to what seems like a highly complex and always-changing magic trick where you have to keep ten plates spinning at once. How can poker affiliate marketers keep up with this confusing new world, and evolve SEO tactics that actually work in a new Internet landscape?

Okay, maybe that’s overstating it — and for those sites successful enough to still dominate the search engines for their respective keywords, they know that things haven’t really changed that much … at least not yet.

But when you consider now just how many of your competitors are also optimizing for the same SEO terms as you are, and how many of them are probably using the same keywords and tactics as you are, it’s easy to get a little scared.

Throw on top of this the fact that there are so many new methods of optimizing content, and so much more content to optimize. Not to mention, there’s a whole hell of a lot more traffic out there … what’s it all mean?

“Search Engine Optimization isn’t just for search engines,” writes Marty Weintraub in a great article called “What the Hell is SEO Now Anyway?” “The moniker has grown to mean much more. SEO means optimizing content that appears any place people hang out.”

So what does that mean? Instead of just playing around with what works on Google, search marketing now means taking the whole shebang of the World Wide Web into consideration when it comes to SEO. That means extending your search marketing efforts to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and something beyond that, what Weintraub calls the “organic contextual”.

“[G]et used to the idea of optimization of organic contextual,” writes Weintraub. “There are so many people walking by so much content in Facebook that valuable collateral interrupt-marketing can be highly targeted and made more compelling by ‘SEO.’ Trust me dude, the whole world is going to be making sure their events and fan pages are ‘optimized’ soon enough.”

But wait — this new method of search marketing beyond the actual search engines isn’t even really SEO, is it?

“Say it’s not really SEO,” Weintraub argues. “Say it’s called mango chutney IT botany. Whatever … There’s little time for semantic disagreements amongst pundits. SEO only focused on Google will be relegated to being SEO for half the Internet. Even so, Facebook organic contextual will index more in traditional search engines as the social graph advises those precious Google & Bing algorithms.

Weintraub ends on a philosophical — but also highly practical — question: “What the hell is SEO now anyway?”

It’s not as enigmatic as it may seem at first. If you’re in business on the Internet, whether the poker affiliate business or any other, you need to know what to do to keep on top of the search engines—today, and next year. And this argument to start experimenting with other, non-search engine types of SEO is absolutely worth experimenting with. Chances are, some of your competitors are already doing so. (If you’re on Facebook, you’re probably already started — you just may not realize it yet.)


 

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