Poker Affiliate Keyword Research Strategies

[Randy]

Keyword research is crucial to SEO for a poker affiliate. What advice would you give someone brand new to the game of being a poker affiliate regarding keyword research strategies?

My advice would be to avoid keyword suggestion tools at the start, and create a site around a theme. Then write your content around that theme and cover the theme well. For example, if I'm launching a website about "Badugi poker", I think about what subjects someone would want to read about related to Badugi poker:

• Badugi poker rules
• How to play Badugi poker
• Where to play Badugi poker online
• Badugi poker strategy

Then I write 1000 words on each subject, get a link or two pointing to the site, and watch my referral logs to find phrases that people actually come to my site for. If I put enough content up on my site, I'll invariably get searches for phrases that I didn't optimize for.

So then I generate more content around those phrases in order to rank higher for them.

As I generate more content, I'll get found for still more phrases I wouldn't have thought of. The cycle continuously repeats itself, and I never have to use Google Suggest or Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery or any other tool.

But that's just one strategy for keyword research for a poker affiliate. What are some other strategies people here use?

[TheShortStack]

Thanks Randy - Keyword Strategy is definitely something I need to improve.

Looking forward to hearing other people's suggestions ...

[J S]

I would say that I am probably the opposite of you in this regard Randy.

I do a quick keyword search on wordtracker and in the free google adwords tool to see what kind of volume I could find for nearly about every piece of content I write.

Doing this research also gives me an idea of other quality related phrases to do a bit of research in as well. I gather this data taking note of any really key keywords that match the content and then I set about to writing the content, or tweaking the content to be optimized for the main key phrases. I will say don't put all your eggs in the wordtracker keyword basket thoughas the results aren't always accurate.

After that I also watch the logs and pretty much do similar things that you say once you see what kind of phrases are sending traffic.
I dislike writing content so if I am going to do it, I want to maximize the bang for it's buck so to speak.

[DealerDan]

I find it best to do a combination of Randy and J's suggestions. I do what Randy said first, and think about what a player would want to know about Badugi - putting yourself into the potential visitors shoes is very important. I brainstorm on that, but before doing any work on the site I'll *then* use the likes of Wordtracker etc. to get more ideas, that way I ideally cover all the bases. And then yes - studying logs etc is a big factor after the site is up and running.

[Randy]

The reason that I DON'T use a keyword tool to map out my content beforehand is because I think my site will look more "natural and unique" than a site built around keyword phrases generated by a tool. It seems to me that lots of webmasters will build a site with a menu that might just as well have been a list of keyword phrases they got from Wordtracker.

That's just my way of thinking though. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that approach.

[SunPoker.com]

- I like to use Google Suggest or the Yahoo suggest tool as they can have some words that relate to what you are targeting but you might not have thought of before.

- I do like to use the Google Adwords keyword tool as well, just to get some ideas flowing that I might not have thought of before

- Read major forums and see what the main topics that are being discussed.

- Using Google Trends for websites to see what keywords are driving traffic to other sites.

- Using the free compete.com tool to get ideas for keywords that other sites are targeting.

- Searching through Yahoo Answers to see what people are looking for regarding poker or casino topics.

Mark

[punchtheclock]

For those of you using a hit and miss type of strategy...What do you guys do when you start to find a new keyword niche that you think might be strong? Do you rearrange some of your internal link architecture and feed juice to a new landing page developed for the new keywords...or do you just start up a new mini site and point a few links over there from the original site that was starting to hit on the new keywords.

[SunPoker.com]

Originally Posted by punchtheclock

For those of you using a hit and miss type of strategy...What do you guys do when you start to find a new keyword niche that you think might be strong? Do you rearrange some of your internal link architecture and feed juice to a new landing page developed for the new keywords...or do you just start up a new mini site and point a few links over there from the original site that was starting to hit on the new keywords.

I think that would depend on the topic or niche. For instance, if you found a niche like poker bonus codes (obviously already been done), you probably might want to set up a site dedicated to just poker bonuses.

If you find a niche like chinese poker, you could probably have a section dedicated to that game within your main site.

Of course, these decisions are completely arbitrary. I know people that set up unique sites for many different niches like, no limit poker strategy only, PLO 8 only, Chinese Poker only.... and generally these sites fair pretty well in the search engines for those keywords because they are very targeted.

It comes down to your strategy and how you want to spend your time. Both ways work.

Mark

[tuktukbkk]

Lets say you then get the list of keywords you want... If you need to put then on your site html right? And should you put them all or select just a few?

[PokerProp]

When I start a new site I'll do what Randy suggested here. I'll cover various topics in detail that all relate to a main topic. Later I'll go back and start to see what keywords the site is ranking for and do some tweaking, changing links or creating new pages etc but its all after the fact and I'm just working to improve what occurred naturally.

I do okay at SEO because most of my traffic is from search engines but I guess techinally I'm not much of an SEO guy I just don't spend the time looking at stats that much so don't take my method with to much weight.

My approach is: good content, wrapped in as simple of code as posible while still focusing on making the site presentable and conversion focused (personally I think a lot of sites with lots of traffic are poor on conversion focus). Once I find that I'm on top page of google for a termi'll then look to maintain and improve the position.

I could probably make a lot more getting really into the link building side of things and analyzing keywords more, but I'm already on the work in blitzes for 3 weeks take 3 weeks off type mode do to short fuse with burn out and guess I don't feel like adding more things to get burnt out with.