Catch & Keep iGaming Players with SEO (Online Casino SEO Best Practice)

© 2012 Promodo United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681

United States+1 347 809-34-86

Best SEO Practices for Online Gambling Sites

Anna Korolekh (Moseva), SEO analyst

Webinar

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http://www.promodo.com/



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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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

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Typical technical issues

Overuse of JavaScript and Flash

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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

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Poor or thin content on the landing pages

Navigation in images, flash or java

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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

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Slow page loading speed


No internal linking whatsoever

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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

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© 2012 Promodo [email protected]

United Kingdom+44 0203 1376 681










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

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Duplicate content issues caused by session ID’s, affiliate ID’s …



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 "/>

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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

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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

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Link Building

3 P’s

888.com backlinks Bwin.com backlinks

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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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Track, Monitor and Analyze!

E-commerce tracking

Enable e-commerce tracking in the admin section of your GA account

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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.

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Result – tons of useful info!

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Thank you for your attention!

Anna Korolekh (Moseva)Promodo

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Business

Catch & Keep iGaming Players with SEO (Online Casino SEO Best Practice)