On Randy’s site http://www.pokerseo.org/ he lists 8 key points that a poker webmaster should follow, I’m going to take a look at each one, talk about it in general and also in specific terms to my making a poker website blog.

1. Plan your SEO before launching your site

    Well I have to admit I didn’t exactly plan my SEO for http://makingapokerwebsite.com. I can’t argue with the point really, seo is such an important part of a successful website. I will say in my defense that this poker website blog is very much about someone who is not an expert at web design finding their way towards creating a decent website. One of the mistakes I made in this area was assuming that WordPress tags were stored as meta tag keywords, where the hell I got that idea from I don’t know. Though this wasn’t quite as bad a mistake as I first thought, as the value of using meta tag keywords is debatable these days.The great thing you’ll discover about WordPress if you ever use it, is that there seems to be plugins for just about anything you can think of. I found a great plugin called all-in-one-seo which helps to simplify making your site search engine friendly http://semperfiwebdesign.com/portfolio/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ .

2. Plan to build a content rich site

   I think I’m on the right track in this regard. I’ve gotten into a good habit of providing one new post in or around a week. In addition to this I’ve also began to add some new pages and see this continuing on.

3. Don’t stress out about the domain name

   I got lucky I think that this domain name wasn’t registered. It pretty much describes what the site is all about, so I’m very happy with that. For the poker site I have in mind I already have registered a few domain names, but I’m inclined to think for a few reasons that I might wait until the time, when I’m ready to begin the poker website, to then choose the name. One of the reasons for this, is because I read somewhere that domain names registered for a longer period are viewed more favorably by search engines, which my domain names aren’t. Also, perhaps were I to come up with another domain name from scratch it might make the whole process a bit fresher.

4. Keep your site design simple

   My website’s design isn’t as simplistic as Randy’s. Nevertheless, I think I’ve kept it reasonably simple. I don’t have a whole lot of colors going on. I’ve big text for ease of readability. I don’t have any flash images. I do have some javascript but that’s because it’s built into the theme I’m using. I think the stuff I do have on my site like social networking tags, tag clouds, latest posts etc add to my user experience, so it serves a purpose rather than being there purely for show.

5. Do the basic on-page search engine optimization stuff

   Again I would have to fail myself for this point. Now that I’ve started to use the all-in-one-seo plugin this should help matters, but I haven’t been paying due diligence to every post and page’s search engine optimization. This is something I absolutely must change going forward and also to get it right from the start once I commence the poker information website.

6. Get links, but don’t stress out about it

   I’ve made pretty much zero effort to get links so far, so I certainly haven’t been stressed out about it. I think I have been right so far not to go looking for links too proactively for my website as it was in its very early stages and I didn’t want to be pestering webmasters looking for links to a site that hadn’t yet much to offer. I think the making a poker website blog is beginning to come along nicely now though and soon I will embark on a link building campaign along with the other non-spammy ways Randy suggest to increase my website’s exposure. I’m thinking sometime in June would be a good time to kick off such a campaign. I will of course blog the whole process.

7. Pay attention to your traffic

     Pay attention to your traffic: After hearing many great things about it, I installed google analytics last week. It provides a whole stream of interlinked information that can really help you address issues and improve the way your site operates in terms of being found more often in search engines and retaining your visitors for longer. The making a poker website blog is still very young, but if and when the site grows, is when I would expect google analytics to be a very useful tool. But even now, I can already see, that for some of my posts, especially the longer ones, that people are not always taking the time to read them. This tells me that perhaps I need to take into account peoples short span of attention these days, perhaps to emphasis key points and provide in post links to key points, such as my post about the best way to display your email address http://www.makingapokerwebsite.com/the-best-way-to-display-your-email-address-on-a-website/. The real juicy bit is at the end of the post when I talk about Recaptcha, but people may not always have the patience to get to this part, so maybe making the overall reading experience more user friendly I can help my readers to get more out of my posts.
   

8. Use the force Luke aka Stay away from the dark side

   Sounds a bit sinister. I presume Randy means don’t try anything underhand, annoying or illegal and so forth. Well I hope it’s clear that I’m putting in some honest effort here. I certainly have no intention of doing anything illegal or underhand such as spamming, sending annoying auto-generated link requests and the like. Anyway that’s a pretty simple point to follow, its either a path you are going to take or not. Even from a purely selfish point of view though I think staying ‘white hat’ makes sense, as Randy says you can make a ‘fortune’ as a poker webmaster by just doing things the right way without undue effort so why the hell take an underhanded approach!

    

Going forward positively?

So on the 8 points though I think I got somethings right, it was by no means a flawless performance. Link building is something for going forward. I’m still not totally happy with some of the finer points of the look of my posts, so I want to address that before I really start to promote my site. The main areas which I need to focus on now is improving the way I do things seo wise and improving the overall experience of the reader on my site. On a positive note I think everything is moving in the right direction and I have learned a few lessons for when it comes around to beginning the poker information site.