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

by Les Romhanyi

Natural linking, what is it and how do I get it? More importantly, do I need it? If you run an Internet web presence that you want others to find in the search engines then the answer to the latter is YES!

What is natural linking? That is an easy question to answer. Natural linking occurs when someone places a link to your site from another site. The reason that someone might link to your site is not really important, the fact that they placed the link is the only thing that matters.

Some of the reasons that someone might place a link to your site or to a page within your website are:

• Your site offers some information that supports a fact or reinforces a position contained within another site.
• Your site offers some tools or resources that would be helpful to others.
• Your site contradicts a common misconception that others want use to validate their own views on that topic.
• Your site represents a controversial viewpoint that others might want to showcase for their own purposes.
• Your site is just so very cool that others need to be made aware of it and seeing as my website links to your site, my site must be cool too!

Regardless of the reasons why someone might be linking to your site, these natural links are very important. Even if someone is linking to your site because they think it is a sad joke and they want others to see how bad your site is, it really doesn’t matter.

Knowing that these types of links are important the next question is, “How do you get people to link to your site?” There are several ways you can get people to link to your site with the easiest being, make a useful site. Easier said then done you are thinking eh?

When you think about it, creating a useful site isn’t that difficult, it just requires time. Time to find helpful tools to share with others, time to find sound advice regarding your site’s topic of interest and time to make your site ooze the “It” factor. The amount of time it will take is solely dependent upon how much effort you want to put in to it.

OK, so you finished your site, now what? How do you let people know that your site is ready to amaze others? There are several ways to let people know about your site. If you have a budget set aside you could set up a PPC campaign that may bring in some traffic. You could join groups or forums that share your interest or even better, that are totally opposite to your site’s message or theme. Perhaps one of the best ways is to write articles that others can use on their sites that are seeded with a few well placed links pointing back to your site.

One of the next big trends that is about to take off is, the “Bartered Link”. Bartered links are where you offer space on your site to host an article written by other webmasters, which contain text links to their sites in exchange for a one way link back to your site. Are bartered links considered to be natural links? If they aren’t then they sure do a fine job of mimicking them.

Regardless of the motivation behind someone linking to your site, even if it is because they think your site is bad or your opinion is wrong, just remember this… the fact that they did is all that truly matters as the link is the thing.

About the Author
Les Romhanyi, Port Coquitlam, BC. Canada
les@bigjuicemedia.com

Les Romhanyi is an SEO specialist with many years experience placing websites at the top of all major search engines. Big Juice Media is a Sports Betting Marketing company based in Canada.

by Les Romhanyi

So you have a new sports betting site and you were hoping to compete with the established sports book sites, how do you go about letting the world know the site exists?

In the old days new sports gambling sites would simply just start aggressive Pay Per Click campaigns. With today’s Internet the search engines no longer allow gambling sites to advertise and that includes a ban on search engine PPC. Removing this type of advertising forced the online gambling providers to come up with other ways of increasing their popularity.

There are a number of strategies you can try in order to attract potential members to your sports betting sites.

1. Optimize your site for higher ranking in the organic searches. This is a tough one seeing as the competition is very steep. Don’t use questionable tactics, just be honest with your SEO and optimize the pages for the content that is actually on each page.
2. Generate topical content well in advance of the sporting event that you would like to promote. Generally speaking, search engines can take 3 to 12 weeks to find new pages so unless you are really up on how to get the pages indexed quicker, give new pages plenty of time to be discovered by the search engines.
3. Allow other sites to use your topical content in exchange for a text link back to your site. Doing this allows you to gain extremely valuable one way text links that will help to increase your link popularity. Just make sure you choose the text for that link carefully and the site posting your article maintains credit to you as the writer.
4. Post articles from other sites. Make sure that the article you post on your site is full of keyword rich text and optimize the page that contains that article for the contents of that article. When done properly this can greatly improve your chances of being found in a search engine for that articles topic.
5. Add a Forum to your site and create categories that promote the events that your site specializes in. For instance, if your site is based out of Europe you might want to make a bunch of categories based on Soccer such as Soccer Injuries, Soccer Trades & Rumors etc. Doing this will generate keyword rich, topical pages that eventually will be indexed by the search engines. The more active you’re Forum, the greater the chance of creating countless pages that the search engines will love.
6. Join forums on other sites and actively contribute to them. You see when posting to other forums your signature is added to the bottom of your post. In your signature you have an opportunity to place some text that could be used to promote your site. Also, some forums will allow you to place text links within the signature. Be respectful and do not stuff the signature with too many text links.
7. Add your site to as many directories as you can. Some directories can take a long time for inclusion, the DMOZ for instance, so you should apply to them as quickly as you can after launching your new sports betting site.
8. Reciprocating links can be helpful as long as you carefully search out potential linking partners. Make sure that the sites you are linking to are quality sites that you yourself would actually spend time on. A good rule of thumb is this – if you would bookmark the site others would probably bookmark it as well and therefore, the site would be a good site to trade links with.
9. Offer affiliate programs to other webmasters. If you offer affiliate programs make sure that you actually pay your affiliates in a timely manner. You would be surprised at how many sites actually don’t treat their affiliates very well. Treat the affiliates like the limited partners that they are and that level of respect will more than likely result in your banners and text links gaining better placement on the affiliate’s websites.
10. Purchase banner space on sports related websites. This can be an expensive proposition so you really need to take care in selecting the sites you want to buy banner space on. Don’t base your decision on Alexa ratings alone as these can easily be skewed. Also be wary of sites stating Hits and Impressions as their verification on traffic. The best stat to base you purchase on is monthly unique visitors and don’t take their word for it, use an independent third party tracker for unbiased results.

Just like everything else in life there are no guarantees but if you adopt some or all of the above mentioned marketing strategies, your site should see improvements over a short period of time.

About the Author
Les Romhanyi, Port Coquitlam, BC. Canada
les@bigjuicemedia.com

Les Romhanyi is an SEO specialist with many years experience placing websites at the top of all major search engines. Big Juice Media is a Sports Betting Marketing company based in Canada.

There seems to be some discussion on the SEO forums about a new hole in the Google search engine algorithms. Before you get excited about a potential new way to skew the results in a favorable manner for your website, I have to tell you that this alleged loophole is more about sabotaging a competitor’s position in the Google search engine. While I personally haven’t seen any reliable reports on Google Bowling, that’s what people are calling it, I have read about the theory behind it.

Google Bowling is where website “A” goes out and buys a bunch of site wide text links using website “B’s” information. In theory the purchasing of site wide links is no longer an acceptable practice for developing link popularity. Not too long ago the acquisition of many inbound links could instantaneously boost a website’s popularity so that said website would rank well within Google. This practice gained the attention of the Google engineers and soon after, a filter was put in place to eliminate this form of manipulation.

Google had an opportunity to solve this problem by nullifying the benefit of this style of linking. Instead, as the theory goes, Google made it so that any site practicing site wide text link purchasing, would get a time out in the sandbox. (As someone who has a site suffering long term in the sandbox, I just wanted to let you all know that I have dibs on the yellow dump truck and backhoe in the corner of the sandbox.)

If Google Bowling is in fact a reality then the websites who do get attacked in this manner by their competitors, will also be receiving a lot of free traffic from all of these text links. Not to mention better placement in Yahoo and MSN searches. I will keep you all posted on this topic as I learn more about it.