Online Marketing » Gaming Industry » Advertising Campaign » Search Engine Optimzation » Search Engine Marketing » Sports Betting

By Greg Taylor and Les Romhanyi

Five years ago, we thought of the Web as a new medium, not a new economy. ~ software engineer, Clement Mok (1999)

Now nearly 10 years later, we still can’t truly grasp the full potential of the Internet on business today. But we do know that the “trend” of online advertising has changed forever the way businesses and consumers interact. And we also know that the web is here to stay.

The clutter on the Internet is growing at a phenomenal rate, with 3.9 million more websites appearing on the web in the month of June alone. Today, there are over 178 million websites and 48.7 billion individual web pages, that number having increased by 50% in the past 12 months. *

This is why search engines have become so ubiquitous, and now are synonymous with web surfing, so much so that over 80% of all customers use search engines to find new websites. *

So the big question is: With all these websites, how are you to be found?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the answer.

SEM is the form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). And the two methods of SEM are organic search or search engine optimization (SEO), the other being sponsored links, or Pay Per Click (PPC).

Organic search refers to the main body of search results that a search engine will display when queried. Usually, and in the case of Google.com, there are 10 listings of results per page and they are lined up on the left side of the results page.

When a search engine spider crawls a website, it gathers information about that site and ranks it against all other sites for that particular topic. The search engine assigns certain values to specific properties of the webpage and the resulting score or algorithm, determines the sites ranking (SERP) for that topic, and displays the link in the organic listings.

Fortunately for website owners and those who practice the art of SEO, these rankings can be manipulated by applying some search engine optimization techniques.

The basic method is to provide meta content — the text contained within a web page’s Meta tags, which form part of the document head used to describe aspects of the document, such as title, description and keywords – inbound links and matching keywords on the page to the meta content. Further optimizing can be done with each website’s architecture and structure, which can either help or hinder how easily it’s indexed by search engines, as well as the use of content management systems (CMS) and other content feeds on the website.

PPC results refer to the listings on the search engines that are usually on the top, bottom, right hand or combination of the three, of the results page. These listings are ranked by bidding on the keywords with the highest bidder taking first place and so on.

However, the online gambling industry’s access to this lead generation channel was eliminated as a result of ongoing pressure applied from the U.S. government and the Department of Justice on the Big 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN.

All forms of government ultimately are not going to succeed in trying to control or censor the Internet ~ Rupert Murdoch

Since the spring of 2004, generating leads through PPC has not been an option for online gambling. The US government’s mandate of restricting this industry through various means, including access to US-based mainstream media, led to the elimination of buying paid listing for anything associated with online gambling.

Google, MSN and Yahoo were all forced to not only stop receiving any future revenues from the online gambling industry, but to also pay retroactive monies earned in the years going back to 1999. The trio agreed to pay a total of $31.5m to settle claims that they accepted online ads promoting gambling. None of the three firms ever accepted any wrongdoing as part of the civil settlement, which concluded an investigation dating back to 2000.

This is the same pressure the US government placed on on Pay Pal, Neteller and The Sporting News to name just a few.

So this push by US authorities to get a stranglehold on mainstream US advertising has now put a huge onus on search engine optimization for today’s online gambling marketers.

This focus and expectation for achieving top search results has created an ever-escalating battle among the top poker rooms, casinos and sportsbooks, each spending more every year to attain top results for a myriad of search terms, all in the name of fresh traffic and increased revenues.

Some online gambling operators have spent upwards of $1-million and more annually, employing as many as two dozen full time staff just to ensure they are “above the fold” on the first page for the top 200-300 keywords relevant to their specific vertical.

And with more websites going up each month, and the increased importance of search engines to drive new customers to various online gambling sites, the monies being spent on search engine optimization will only increase year over year.

But for the various online gambling operators who have focused resources and budget on this dynamic medium, search marketing has proved to be very profitable and will continue to be so for at least the foreseeable future.

Long live the web and SEO.

* (source Netcraft webserver survey).

Greg Taylor – President, Big Juice Media
Greg has worked in the online sports betting industry for over a decade, working in a marketing and communications capacity with some of the largest online sportsbooks such as Bodog, Bet365, Nine, betED, BetOnline and Sportingbet. In the past few years, Big Juice Media has focused on the Search Marketing channel for both online gambling and fantasy sports.

Les Romhanyi – Director of Search, Big Juice Media
Les has optimized websites for search engines before it was even called Search Engine Optimization, going back to 1995 while working on the Net Sheppard project. Since then, he has provided SEO services to the online adult, real estate and pharmaceutical verticals, as well as online gambling.

Well well well – what did I get in my inbox this morning? You guessed it, more emails from the same people I wrote about a few days ago. If you recall their email said that…

NOTE: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind.We are sending this mail with sole intention of link exchange for mutual benefit.If you are not intersted in Link Exchange then you can reply simply “NO”, We will never contact you again.

It seems that they do not live up to their claims regarding contact as I clearly sent them email say “NO”. Hell I even went a little further and included some other information in my request, might have been about “sex and travel” or it could have been something about “autonomous sexual relations”. Any way it really doesn’t matter as I clearly spelled out the word “NO” and clearly they do not understand the concept of NO.

These latest emails came with another invitation to be excluded from further contact.

NOTE: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind.We are sending this mail with sole intention of link exchange for mutual benefit.If you are not intersted in Link Exchange then you can reply simply “NO”, We will never contact you again and also if you have already added our link on your sites then please change our following link info(Title,Description) given as bellow.For this we give you a new link back from my other relevant and quality site.

Now it seems that I will have to go one step further and contact the company that hired this outsourced SEM service and let them know that while they may be saving some money by employing some India based SEM sweat shop, they are in fact hurting their reputation by using them. Does the money you save by outsourcing equal the potential loss of reputation? I highly doubt it.

How often do you receive unsolicited email that starts off with the line “We are not spammers”? These types of email usually have something to do with a request for a link trade. The sad part is that they usually offer to do a 3 way link exchange where they offer to put your link on some useless domain that doesn’t offer a hope in being taken seriously as a directory, and request that you give them a link to their main site.

Here is an exact copy of the first part of the email;
NOTE: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind.We are sending this mail with sole intention of link exchange for mutual benefit.If you are not intersted in Link Exchange then you can reply simply “NO”, We will never contact you again.

I have once again requested that these dip shits stop sending me emails, I wonder what part of the word “NO” they don’t understand, perhaps the quotation marks are throwing them off?

Every once in a while I will have a little fun with these “outsourced” so called experts and respond with something like this;

“I would love to exchange links with you on this condition – you link to my site from your main site and I will link to your shitty site (site’s name left in on purpose) with some spammy, phoney, link directory site that I will develop specifically for you.”

Of course just to avoid any confusion I don’t use quotation marks. Perhaps what I will attempt next time is to translate the above mentioned response into a whole bunch of languages so that I can have a hope that these sweat shop “experts” might finally understand.

These websites that use outsourced SEO services, perhaps you need to take a look at what these companies are doing for your properties. Myself, when I get these spam emails from the same services over and over again I make note of the main website they are trying to build the link popularity for and I go out of my way to inform my counterparts for this industry to avoid that site like the plague.

About 1 year ago I contacted the fine people at Yahoo to find out why I could never get a client’s site indexed beyond the main index page. After checking to make sure that the site wasn’t in violation of any of their rules I sent an email to Yahoo to discuss my findings.

The only thing that I could discern was that the earliest information regarding this domain was still being listed in several of their directories. Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing but seeing as the site changed ownership and focus back in 1996, the old directory listings are completely wrong.

Provided with this information it was fairly easy for someone at Yahoo to ascertain that this was the issue and I was told that they would address this issue soon. They even went so far as to extend to me an invitation to send in follow up questions to which I only received a standard form email, totally unacceptable! Well it has been a long time now and Yahoo doesn’t seem to want to address this issue.

After a few months of waiting I asked if it would be helpful if I were to resubmit my client’s site to the directories and paid for re-inclusion. Typically – I got the standard form response once again. With this kind of customer service is it any wonder that Yahoo.com is losing market and search share?

My only hope now is that someone over a Yahoo might read this and become concerned enough about their product to try to improve it. While I can’t reveal the site here, as that would not be appropriate to this forum, I can assure those of you who might read this; the site is obviously an old site and probably one that predates Yahoo itself.

If the Yahoo directories are so flawed that it takes more than 11 years to update the information contained within, what good are they? If these old directories are having a negative effect on my client’s site and have been doing so for more than a decade, I can only suggest that if Yahoo refuses to fix this issue then I would strongly suggest caution to those webmasters who were thinking of including their sites within the Yahoo directories.

It would be cool if someone from Yahoo were to contact me through a private email in this forum and follow up on this issue.

For those of you who do not know that the ODP or the Open Directory Project, can sometimes override the descriptions on your site in the organic search listings.

The reason that this could be bad for your site is that the editors at the ODP don’t take your SEO efforts in to account when they write their descriptions. While a link from the ODP can be good in terms of helping your ranking in the search engines this benefit can also hamper your conversion due to some less than flattering description of your site.

Myself, I have always tried to write decent descriptions that accurately describe what any given page is about so as to help searchers make an informed decision on whether or not to visit my site. To have those efforts thrown out because some search engine decided take a short cut and allow someone who doesn’t represent my site or products write about them has always been a bit of a sore spot within the SEO community.

It only took a few years for some of the search engines to catch on to this complaint and address it, Google being the first with Yahoo was soon following suit. With that little problem addressed it seemed that a similar situation might be happening with old Yahoo Directory listings as well.

Back in late February 2007 the Yahoo search blog posted this information regarding the their own directory Titles and abstracts…

We’re adding support for the Meta tag called ‘NOYDIR’ that will complement the ‘NOODP’ Meta tag, which we already support. If you’re unfamiliar, the ‘NOODP’ Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages. While we continue to pull from various sources to provide the best title and abstract for a given page in search results, we realize that webmasters may still want the ability to exclude titles and abstracts from the Yahoo! Directory. So, as promised, we’re providing support for ‘NOYDIR’ which will recognize the following Meta tags on your pages:

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”

or (don’t forget to add the “<" and ">” to the meta tags)

META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”

For pages with this tag, we will not use Yahoo! Directory titles or abstracts for your URL in web search results. This will grant webmasters the ability to participate in the Yahoo! Directory Submit program and benefit from inclusion in the Yahoo! Directory, while maintaining control over URL titles and abstracts in search. This will not have any effect on the Yahoo! Directory Search experience, which will continue to use the Yahoo! Directory and title abstract information.

We are re-indexing content on the web to launch this change, and you should immediately begin to see the changes on Yahoo! US, Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Korea. (Other regions will roll-out in the future.) This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling that is typical of weather updates.

If you have any questions, please refer to our webmaster resources page or visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Thanks!
Priyank GargProduct Manager, Yahoo! Search

Thanks Privank and here is to hoping that this little tag may help fix some issues that I have heard complaints about over the years!

You know it never ceases to amaze me how these new SEO companies can send out emails offering to raise websites in the search engines without even doing the most basic research first. When I say simple I mean basic research like finding out the domain of the site they are emailing?

Here is a typical example of an email they send out:

“I’ve helped many well-known companies get the highest search engine placement for their website at the lowest cost, and want to do the same for you. If your interested, reply with the website address you want reviewed and how you would like me to contact you with the details.”

How can these people honestly think that they should be trusted to improve anything when they can’t even be trusted to look at the website prior to emailing somebody about their services?

If that were the worst of it that would be bad enough but when you go and review the site that sent you the email, to see if they have the ability to back up that claim, you usually come across some cookie cutter website that lacks any useful information. The most recent offer that came to me came from some site that was made up entirely in Flash.

I am not going to tell you what you need to do in order to successfully sign up new clients but I will suggest this… do some research first!

One of the things about clients I have never understood is their desire to enter into exclusive SEO contracts. While I understand the need to out perform the competition with regards to search engine rankings, what I don’t understand is how being exclusive is going to get a site to list in more than 2 positions in any given SERP (search engine ranking page).

Let me explain – If a search engine offers 10 results per page for any search query, the best any site can ever hope to achieve is 2 listings out of the10. If said site gets the two positions on a page in the search engine that still leaves 8 spots that you will not be able to rank for with the same site.

Now let’s say for arguments sake that you are working for a company that has multiple sites that offer the same products and or services, you could attain positions for that search phrase for each of those sites but then those sites would only be competing with the company’s own sites thus lowering the ROI for each of those sites. Sure you may be capturing the SERP for that search query (I have done this for a client in the past, 6 different sites capturing 6 out of 10 page one results) but is it really worth the extra cost for exclusivity to out perform your own sites?

In my opinion it is far better to spend the extra money you would have spent on exclusivity into making your site better for the people who use your site.

When getting ready to build a new site or redesign a site one of the most important tings you can do is plan out the website architecture. How many folders do you need and what should you call them? How many files are you going to keep in the root folder? Once you know the answers to these the rest should come quite easily.

You see when you have applied this thought process to designing your site it becomes much easier to plan the rest of your SEO for the pages that make up your site. Take a piece of paper or open a text editor and actually lay out your site prior to building it, be sure to use the file names you want for each page as well as the names for your folders. When done, sit back and take a look at the structure and fine tune it if needs be.

Start with your main index file and work your way down from there. For instance your document might look like this;

index.html
site-map.html
contact-us.html
/casino/index.html
/casino/where-to-begin.html
/casino/games.html
/sportsbook/index.html
/sportsbook/lines.html
/sportsbook/members/index.html
/banking/index.html
/banking/deposits.html
/banking/withdrawal.html
/poker/index.html
/poker/texas-holdem.html

It does take a bit of time and effort to create a site tree but once it is finished I am sure you will be referring to it regularly when developing your search engine optimization campaign.