It’s not very often that I post about SEO on this blog, because to be honest my skills are more in marketing and “thinking outside the box” stuff. I figured I haven’t posted any webmaster type stuff for a while though so I will give a few easy and basic SEO tips that all affiliate marketers and Poker Affiliates should be utilizing.

For starters, if you do not have a proper sitemap on your blog or website you are missing the boat. Afterall, even in Google’s webmaster guidelines, they recommend every site should have a sitemap.

If XML and producing a sitemap sounds confusing, it is not. In fact, it’s very simple. Go to this site and generate your sitemap as an html file or whatever. Then simply download it to your PC. Next upload it to your FTP and place a link to it somewhere on your homepage.

After you have a sitemap installed, you want google to be aware of it. As Markus Tandler said at the Poker Conference, if you’re not using Google’s Webmaster Central, you’re crazy. Google provides free resources for us, and their tools section is where you can submit your sitemap. By simply creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google, you may see a nice bump in your SERPS.

Plus with their tools section you can analyze if Big G sees any major diagnostic problems when crawling your site.

So now you have a sitemap installed and have submitted to google tools. What next you ask? Obviously you need quality links coming to your site. I won’t beat on a dead horse about the importance of QUALITY vs. QUANITY. But just know this is one of the fundamental most important aspects of SEO.

A few easy and basic SEO tips however that many poker affiliates neglect to use are as follows:

1. Deep Linking - Getting links from external sources are great, but don’t forget to link within your own site. Almost every high ranking site I see always tries to feed link juice to other pages within their own site when writing articles or news. The big SEO’s probably hate that I bring this up, but it’s really just common sense, and if you’re not a lazy ass like me, it does work very well, especially when you include good anchor text.

2. Bolding Keywords – If there are a few keywords you want to stand out to Google on a new page, Bold them up, <b> </b>. Don’t get ridiculous though, bolding the keyword once or twice per page should be enough.

3. Title Tags - Do not use the same title tag on every page, such as your site’s main title. I know this sounds so basic……but if I didn’t see it, I wouldn’t even bring it up. In the title tags for each page, be sure to include your keywords once or twice, but don’t overdue it. Same goes for the description and meta tags.

4. Content Is Still King - No matter how many links you get or how great your “homepage” SEO is, content still is and will always be king. Write with your readers in mind before you write with SERPS in mind. Google is very smart and can tell if you are generating shit content solely for the search engines.

When it comes to SEO, just be smart, use common sense, and learn from the people who are ultra-successful in the affiliate marketing spectrum. Submitting to directories and buying links for a less than par site can only go so far in this day and age.

I am by no means an SEO Expert, but I can tell you that everything mentioned above is very basic and is a necessity if you want to be successful in your adventures in search engine marketing.

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