catch & keep igaming players with seo (online casino seo best practice)
DESCRIPTION
Find out best practices of online casino promotion, typical search engine optimization blunders that hamper online gambling sites rankings growth in the search engines and ways to fix or avoid them.TRANSCRIPT
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Best SEO Practices for Online Gambling Sites
Anna Korolekh (Moseva), SEO analyst
Webinar
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Is it actually that tough?
Target audience for online gambling businesses narrows down to European, mostly British, French, Russian and Australian men aged 18 - 40 years old with at least $75,000 income.
Very limited marketing opportunities – no TV, no printed ads, very expensive PPC
Illegal in over 28 countries: ….
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United States+1 347 809-34-86
What is left for online gambling?
Social Media Campaigns
Word-of-mouth Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
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Keyword research
There are very few search queries that promise to bring big amounts of traffic
No “magic” long tail phrases that generate converting traffic
“casino uk”, “uk online casino”, “internet casino” …
Pokies
Fruit machines
Long tail keywords can be used to generate more passive traffic, to create a community
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Typical technical issues
Overuse of JavaScript and Flash
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Overuse of JavaScript and Flash
Make sure that you have good landing pages with lots of text content
Google or any other search crawler has not yet learnt to read flash or java properly
Create separate pages with text descriptions of the games at your casino, explaining rules and basic strategies
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Typical technical issues
Overuse of JavaScript and Flash
Poor or thin content on the landing pages
Navigation in images, flash or java
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Navigation in images, Flash or Java
Most advanced search engine crawlers are now only learning to read java and recognize the images
Use static text links in your navigation
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Typical technical issues
Overuse of JavaScript and Flash
Poor or thin content on the landing pages
Slow page loading speed
Navigation in images, flash or java
No internal linking whatsoever
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Slow page loading speed
Page loading speed of more than two-three seconds is considered too slow by Google
You can check this user loading speed in your Webmaster Tools account in Labs -> Performance
© 2012 Promodo [email protected]
United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Typical technical issues
Overuse of JavaScript and Flash
Poor or thin content on the landing pages
Slow page loading speed
Navigation in images, flash or java
No internal linking whatsoever
Incorrect use and overuse of pop-ups and pop-unders
Duplicate content issues caused by session ID’s, ad ID’s or special landing pages for ppc campaigns
© 2012 Promodo [email protected]
United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Duplicate content issues caused by session ID’s, affiliate ID’s …
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Make sure that Google does not index that all along with normal URLs
http://www.planet7casino.com/?affid=8472,t=PL86747b19ed4e7f0be70b437992cd7a60,ycid=2,yaid=5486
http://casinograndluxe.com/eng/?sourceID=1054962
Block such urls with a robots.txt directive
Disallow: /?*
Canonicalize the URLs
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.casino-example.com/roulette-games "/>
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Typical technical issues
Overuse of JavaScript and Flash
Poor or thin content on the landing pages
Slow page loading speed
Navigation in images, flash or java
No internal linking whatsoever
Incorrect use and overuse of pop-ups and pop-unders
Duplicate content issues caused by session ID’s, ad ID’s or special landing pages for ppc campaigns
Poor use of redirects, wrong server codes
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Poor use of redirects, wrong server codes
Make sure that you redirect the site to one canonical version of your choice www or non-www using a permanent 301 redirect
All the non-existent pages are to respond with a 404 server code
When you set a 404 error, ask your designers to draw a custom 404 page that would have the logo, layout and navigation of the rest of your site
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Link Building
3 P’s
888.com backlinks Bwin.com backlinks
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Link Building.Always look at what your competitors are doing!
Massive amounts of bought links
Submit your site for review at designer’s, usability specialists’, developers’ communities and forums etc.
Job boards.
Hold give-aways and competitions and offer the info about them for publication at niche specific blogs and gambling forums..
Free stuff always works.
Affiliate sites, satellite sites and blog networks.
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United States+1 347 809-34-86
Track, Monitor and Analyze!
E-commerce tracking
Enable e-commerce tracking in the admin section of your GA account
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United States+1 347 809-34-86
E-commerce tracking codePaste the e-commerce tracking code at your thank you page, leave only the fields that are required
For optional arguments that we do not fill, you should supply an empty placeholder to avoid errors.
© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Result – tons of useful info!
© 2012 Promodo [email protected]
United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681
United States+1 347 809-34-86
Thank you for your attention!
Anna Korolekh (Moseva)Promodo