Many gambling affiliates make the mistake of targeting key phrases they simply don’t have a chance of ranking highly. You don’t need to rank for key phrases such as online poker or even online casino to make money. In a previous article, search volume explained, I discussed how to ascertain how much traffic specific key phrases will generate. Many affiliates overestimate the potential traffic of specific key phrases, ending up wasting time and money to rank highly with just a trickle of daily traffic.
For new affiliates, trying to rank for key phrases such as poker bonus and casino bonus is simply far too difficult a task. You can make things much easier for yourself by targeting some on the smaller poker and casino sites. For example let’s imagine there is an operator called Big Joe that offers online poker and online casino games. We could simply target long tail key phrases such as Big Joe Poker Bonus, Big Joe Poker Rakeback, Big Joe Rakeback, Big Joe Casino Bonus etc. Simply make things easier for yourself. Remember though that some key phrases convert much better than others. The key phrase Big Joe Freeroll may well attract decent traffic and sign ups, but the fact is the signups will be much harder to convert into real money players.
Before starting out to target any key phrase take the time to examine the links of the actual sites that rank top three for the specific key phrases you intend to target. There are many free tools available to help you.
Start by finding the number of backlinks each of the top three sites actually has with backlink checking tools. You can also check backlinks using Majestic SEO although this tool will also show many low value and site wide links which have little value. Perhaps a better option is to use the SEOMoz Linkscape tool. I’m a firm advocate of measuring link value by page and domain analysis.
Just following the basic advice in this article will ensure that once you decide which key phrases you are going to target, you will know how many links you require, the quality of the links you require and even the time frame required to build the links.
