Poker SEO

It’s odd how when you are made aware of something, you start to notice it everywhere and, in some cases, you think about it all of the time. It wasn’t that you didn’t know about it before, it’s that you never really paid attention. And you’re not sure why you never cared before. For me, that’s exactly how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) fit into my life. When I ran thepokerdb, I don’t think I ever cared at all about our Google rankings, Google pagerank, incoming links or anything of the sort. Our site was a complete mess from an SEO standpoint, but it just never mattered to me. My primary goal was to make sure we always had complete data — not to market the site as effectively as possible. I always figured if the content was good, people would use the site regardless of other factors. Little did I know that what I was doing was the overarching backbone of SEO: content is king.

Flash forward three or four years and I’ve got the same mindset, but slightly altered: if you built it in an optimized fashion, people will use the site more. I don’t ever want to get to the point where I build sites based on my ideas solely for search engine robots. That’s when things will fail. But I can build a site for users and also make it easy for Google to figure out. That’s my goal with everything that I do from this point forward. Anything from this blog to my role at BLUFF to PSDollars to the stuff that I’m working on now — everything revolves around the users first and Google second. But that’s an important second.

So anyway, I am going to be posting a number of things here. First, search engine commentary both in and out of the poker world. Second, site reviews and analysis of some of the more SEO-focused poker websites. Third, general SEO strategy articles. I hope you find it useful and interesting.

Site Reviews:

PocketFives - August 11th, 2008
CardsChat - August 11th, 2008
TwoPlusTwo - August 11th, 2008

Past Blog Posts with SEO Content (reverse chronological order):

August 27th, 2008 - Google Suggest changes impact on poker SEO
July 12th, 2008 - More About Google and Poker
July 3rd, 2008 - Weird Things Going on at Google
June 26th, 2008 - Interesting Moments in Search
May 28th, 2008 - Jailbait Gallery
March 8th, 2008 - thepokerdb site improvement
Dec 21st, 2007 - thepokerdb seo update
Dec 6th, 2007 - SEO at thepokerdb and BLUFF