BetUS Poker SEO Review
I am going to start mixing in posts with pages for my Poker SEO section. This is an SEO review of BetUS Poker, which is a subdirectory in their website.
I’ll start off with the bad and sloppy things that I see on the site:
1. http://www.betus.com/poker/Default.aspx returns a 200. But it still redirects to the correct page (www.betus.com/poker). I’m actually a little confused about what’s going on here:
2. PHPSESSID in URL in Google. Maybe they’re still not sure how to handle redirects and htaccess-style stuff correctly?
3. Random spelling problem. Looks unprofessional and can cause Google problems if it got more wide-spread. I don’t think it is widespread on this site though.
4. Mis-titled link. Using bad anchor text even on internal links is not a good thing. One of those “Hand Rankings” links is actually going to a Tips page.
5. No internal nofollow’ing at all. They have: About us, Contact, FAQs, Privacy Policy, Rules & Regulations, Terms & Conditions, Affiliate Program. A bunch of those could be nofollow’ed and I don’t think they’d face any real risk of reprisal from Google. Keeping that link juice flowing to the more important pages is a pretty big deal.
6. Lazy SERP optimization. These are the metas on their Omaha page:
meta name="description" content="BetUS Poker - Learn how to play Omaha Poker Online. Rules and Betting. Play online multi-player poker, poker tournaments, texas hold'em, omaha, omaha hi-lo, 7 card stud, 5 card stud and 1-on-1 heads up poker at BetUSPoker.com. Sign up and get a huge bonus."
and…
meta name="keywords" content="online poker, poker room, online multi player poker, texas hold'em, omaha, omaha hi-lo, 7 card stud, 5 card stud, 1-on-1 poker, heads up poker, online poker tournaments, poker Satellite tournaments, free online poker, poker software, betus, bet us"
That meta description is 257 characters. That’s a solid 97 characters over what Google will display. There’s no point to that. Plus it’s barely optimized for Omaha. I also think that many meta keywords is pointless, although I recognize that meta keywords aren’t exactly an important tag in today’s search environment. But I would still trim it to like “omaha poker, learn to play omaha, play omaha online” and maybe like one or two more.
7. http://www.betus.com/poker/pro-tips.aspx This content is tooooooo long. They contain a lot of good content in one page — and they have multiple pages worth of content that could, possibly, rank well for a lot of different terms. I would split it up a bit.
8. Bad linking at the bottom of the page. This is just sloppy, but at the bottom of the page, they have these two graphics:
The problem is that the images looked like this before they switched to the above configuration:
Note: I removed the middle image so the image would fit on my blog.
The problem is that they never switched the links (as of this writing). So the Gold Cards image goes to Guarantees. And the Guarantees image link goes to Poker Freerolls.
But no one bothered to change the links to go to the correct spots. That could be a little confusing to Google, but more importantly it contributes to a bad user experience.
Okay, enough bad things… Time for the good things:
1. Super strong old domain. Pretty easy to carry that authority over to a poker section with less risk of trouble from Google. Of course, anything is possible, but it’s still much less likely with an old/trusted domain.
2. Great use of text and minimalistic design. The site is clean without all sorts of extraneous crap.
3. Clean HTML — well, as clean as can be in ASP.CRAP. Since the web programming language quasi-forces all sorts of random nonsensical stuff into the code, you can rarely get ASP.CRAP code to look as good as PHP code. But they do a good job of using CSS-styled XHTML code (although, of course, it doesn’t validate).
4. Good internal linking to the poker landing page with “online poker”, “play online poker” and related phrases. Since that’s such an important keyword, it’s a great strategy to focus on it provided that the company will continue to put in the effort to rank for that keyword.
5. Not overdo’ing it with links. They have just 47 internal links (no external links) on the poker landing page. And most of those are below the fold in the heavily-linked footer. So they’re keep the poker page relatively focused on their chosen keywords, which is good in my opinion. Maybe they could use a few more links, but overall it’s better than going completely and utterly overboard.
6. I like the content. It’s the standard fare, but they’ve done a pretty good job putting it together. For “beginner”-type of content, my usual measurement stick is whether I would feel comfortable giving it to a non-poker friend or family member to read and feel confident that they would come away understanding the game of poker well enough to play a home game (assuming they paid attention). I think BetUS’s poker section qualifies there. That being said, it is not ground-breaking writing so I wouldn’t read it or link to it as being interesting to me, but I don’t think it is really designed to do any of that.
Overall, I think BetUS’s Poker SEO is pretty good. They’ve been bouncing into the top 10 for “online poker” and I only expect them to go up from there.
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