Quick SEO Guide for Online Gambling – Part 2

We at Simka Consulting hope you had a restful weekend.

Today we take a look at the next SEO strategy – off page optimization, continuing from where we left off last weekend. In our “Quick SEO Guide for Online Gambling – Part 1”, we dealt with on-page optimization. Off-page optimization comprised of 75% of your general SEO strategy for online gambling website. Both on and off page SEO must be carried out simultaneously for the long term for the most effective results.

Understanding Off-Page Optimization

If on-page SEO is bout drawing the attention of the Google crawler, off page SEO involves building authority and trust in the content that you are generating. In order to build authority, other websites must link to your gambling website. More quality websites linking to you elevates your value and earns you the requisite checkmarks from Google or other search engines.

Merely quantity of sites linking to you is not sufficient. Initially it was, but not today. Like SEO strategies are constantly improving, the Google algorithms are getting more refined. Earning to generating links from diverse and quality websites is of paramount importance. This is essentially defined as link building.

A good off-page SEO revolves around compelling content. If the content you generate for your gambling website is of high value to your online audience, then the probability of this content being shared and circulated increases. With a good on-page SEO strategy coupled with fresh content, the incoming links to your gambling site will multiply. This is called a link-bait.

Press Release and Social Media

As of 2013, social media efforts incorporated within your off-page and overall SEO strategy is a must.  Social media and gambling forums provide you a great way to interact with like-minded people and have genuine conversations. Make sure you subtly drive your audience to your website. PR is an effective medium to maximize the reach of your product or website to a different audience from that of social media. The end users or reader of your PR will usually be influences in your gambling niche. Blasting news via PR sites will not add value to your website. The content that you feed these PR sites should be unique.

Link Building

As we have seen before that the quality of the websites linking to you should be good. Also the anchor text used to link to your website must be specifically the keyword your have chosen to target. For instance: if your website is linking to SimkaConsulting.com; the anchor text that would benefit us most would be “iGaming Consultancy”. Anchor text is nothing but a clickable hyperlink.

Link building should be ethical. Ethical link building will take you a fairly long time to gain authority. But this is the right way to build your links for off-page SEO. This can only happen via compelling content. The faster way to build backlinks is: article marketing, directory submission and paid links. But if you draw Google’s attention to these tactics, you can be severely punished thus causing you a loss of business. Few years’ back, SEO’s practicing these could get away but not anymore especially after the Panda and Penguin updates.

Google now does not value directory submission, as it does not index the directories, so your effort is a complete waste. Your gambling website might even be penalized for this. The Google algorithm is also fine-tuned to detect fraudulent linking like buying paid links. It can clearly distinguish between a natural incoming link and a paid link.

The practice of writing one article, spinning it with the help of software or using MS Word can prove costly with the latest algorithm changes developed by Google. Hence it’s best to steer clear of unethical off-page SEO strategy and focus primarily on developing good content.

Google Panda and Google Penguin

Google keeps refining its algorithm that ranks all the sites throughout the year. But in recent times, they have made two major changes to their algorithm: Panda and Penguin.

Panda update was devised to target “content farms”. These are websites that had too many ads, too many links and content that was “spun”.  Some of the most reputed websites like Suite101 and Ezine Articles even took a hit because they allowed low quality content on their websites.

Penguin update aimed to penalize sites that were over-optimized. This update punished websites that stuffed keywords into their content just for the ranking. Not only that, websites indulging in link building schemes like paid links etc.

These two updates will be refreshed throughout the course of 2013 hence we hope you guys will build your links ethically and generate fresh content.