SEO at thepokerdb and BLUFF
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something that I never thought about much before my trip to Costa Rica. The guys at PSO and P5s really opened my eyes to the power of google as a traffic generation tool. Of course, I’d *known* that google could provide significant traffic, it was just never in the forefront of my mind. I was more focused on things like user interface, as I probably should have been.
However, at some point, once the product is doing well, any webmaster (being used as a generic term for someone who runs websites) should really look into SEO. So I decided to read up and get the guys at BLUFF into SEO as soon as possible.
Luckily for me, the guy who runs the websites at BLUFF (bluffmagazine.com, worldseriesofpoker.com, fightmagazine.com) instantly agreed to get on board. Not only that, he started reading as well. Soon we knew *most* of what we needed to know to really improve overall site SEO. And the results have been dramatic to say the least.
Here is a graph of our daily search engine traffic:
While I am leaving off the hard numbers for obvious reasons, you can see how our traffic from search engines has basically doubled in three weeks. That’s extraordinary. It speaks not only to the job that we’ve done fixing the website, but also to how incredibly bad our SEO was before. I expect it to keep climbing as we keep making improvements. Most notably, we still don’t have one of the big keys in SEO — an XML sitemap. Also, a number of our changes haven’t been indexed by google yet, so we haven’t really seen the results. And none of that has anything to do with our off-site SEO (ie, link building) that I plan on getting us involved in.
Edit: I also want to thank Steve Badger and his poker-seo website. Very helpful commentary, although he did say that some of the people at BLUFF are untrustworthy 
. At least I know he wasn’t referring to me as I’ve never spoken to him and the only contact I’ve ever had with him was via email in the last day or two. Nonetheless, his analysis provided a number of helpful hints.
Related posts:
- thepokerdb SEO update
- thepokerdb site improvement
- About the Bluff Media purchase of thepokerdb
- Jailbait Gallery
- thepokerdb update
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Comments
For keywords research I can recommend you seodigger.com, just trace your competitors keywords and positions in SERP, they’ve done all the work allready 
.
also overture.com and wordtracker.com can help you.
Yo Nat. nice job with the SEO. I’m surprised that Bluff hadn’t been doing that before. That incremental traffic is impressive. Your user engagement may suffer a bit, but hopefully by a lesser factor. What do you guys do for SEM? Just typed in poker, bluff, pokerstars, etc. into google search and there are ZERO sponsored links for the results pages. This seems very strange to me.
later-D1
Be careful to stay within the boundaries of what Google considers acceptable SEO. If you don’t, Bluff could end up kicked out of Google altogether. In particular, hiring an SEO firm to create a lot of bogus links to your site would put you in danger.
[...] BLUFF SEO project that I’ve written about a few times before (Post #1) (Post #2) is still coming along great. We started tracking our search traffic on Nov 14th. On [...]
[...] wrote about this back in the November/December timeframe when we started the project. See: (Post #1) (Post [...]
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That’s cool to see. I’m guessing that most of what you changed were “on page” factors. That’s kind of the basic first step to improve SEO, and the one that’ll give you the most immediate results.
XML site mapping is a pain in the butt…have fun