“Don’t be evil” is Google’s slogan and it can be found in the Google internal code of conduct.

it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can

Unfortunately for us affiliates, Google is only referring to serving their users with this motto. They seem to have no qualms about taking the bread and butter from affiliates by moving into vertical space such as finance, travel and gaming.

Typing “Credit cards” into Google shows the usual few paid ads above the organic listings, but hello – squeezed between the paid adverts and the organic listings, we now see “Google Comparison Ads”, offering Google’s own Credit Card comparison facility.

Was there a need for this? I doubt it. Is Google providing superior services to their users than was not already available? Definitely not. Google is diversifying, and some might say, being greedy.

As well as providing search, Google’s primary business model was copying your content analyzing it and displaying their advertising around it. Publishers and web-site creators are essential to Google’s business, and without publishers Google can’t exist.

Recently Google has spent a heck of a lot of money buying data companies which will allow the search giant to KO a lot of small, medium and large online affiliates and businesses by essentially jumping the queue on search results pages, offering their own services before those of these affiliate web-sites.

In July, Google acquired flight information company ITA, and recently Google is rumoured to have secretly paid up to $200M for shares of Zynga, which owns the biggest social poker site in the world. When poker inevitably gets legalised in the USA again, will it be PokerStars and FullTilt which players flock to to play poker for real money, or will it be Zynga (which boasts millions of users, has no affiliate program, and which is awash with bad players, also known as “fish”)?

No doubt many SEOers and finance site owners are pretty cut up about the seemingly anti-competitive move that Google has made by planting its own advertisements in the SERPS (can anyone else bid on this particular lucrative ad-spot?). The same will no doubt happen in the travel vertical (we have already seen the near-death of the high-street travel agent due to the internet. Does anyone actually go to bricks and mortal travel agents anymore?)

It seems affiliate marketing is doomed if Google decides to take the cream at the top of every vertical for itself. First finance, then travel, then gaming.. what’s next? Pornography and dating? A world where Google’s own pornographic site is ranked above sex.com and redtube may not be far away!

Is Google knocking the first nail into the coffin of online affiliate marketing?

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If you have wondered how to add facebook like buttons to your blog/website, this quick guide will get you set up in less than five minutes.

Adding Facebook like buttons to your site/blog is pretty simple – one just needs to construct a url parameter (the page we want to associate with the facebook like button) and pass it in as a parameter when we include the facebook “like” I-Frame. Retrieving the current page URL can be done via PHP or through calls to your CMS.

Example: (PHP).

<div class="fblike">
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=<? echo ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>"
scrolling="no" frameborder="0"
style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>
</div>
;

Adding Facebook Like button to Wordpress Blog

Adding the code above to your single.php wordpress template will show a like button on the bottom of all of your pages. With a line or two of code, you can also opt to show the like button on only specific categories or whatever you desire.

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This morning I noticed that Microsoft’s search engine Bing! is listing affiliate links in some sitelinks (the groups of links you see under some sites in the SERP listings).

Example:

The sitelink shown in the image above for 32vegas Casino on UKGF is actually an affiliate link (301′d via a .htaccess file). The link is sitewide in one of the tabs of the sidebar on the site in question, and is actually rel=nofollow’ed. Note that the URI may appear to be internal to a “dumb” spider (the link goes to to http://example.com/32vegas.com/).

Pre-third-coffee thoughts on affiliate links in SERPs:

• The fact that Bing is giving sitelinks for something which isn’t even particularly emphasised or important is interesting, but not very encouraging in regards to spiders/search-engine technology working well to improve the user experience.
• Would Bing! have indexed the link as a sitelink if it were awash with parameters and linked out rather than seeming to be an internal link (at first glance)?
• This has got to be good for affiliates, right?
• This is bad for usability – users will click on the link and bypass the desired web-site completely, perhaps causing confusion, and debasing all the good stuff the webmaster put in, in regards content creation, editorial costs, technical costs and on and off-site SEO
• If the site owner wants to ditch the sitelink on Bing! to help navigation and actually take users their own site content as expected, it seems that this site owner, and other webmasters need to monitor and occassionally edit their site-links using Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools!

Maybe this is a temporary glitch from Bing, but for now, what does affiliate links in SERP listings mean to you and to your users?

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Internet marketing is about getting traffic (potential customers) and turning them into actual customers (converted). The conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert from website visits into desired actions (e.g. depositing players on a poker/casino/bingo site). The Conversion rate is defined as number of goals achieved divided by the number of visits (where goals may refer to registrations or depositors).

Here I present 10 top tips for affiliates to increase conversions from a gambling related web-site.

• Use Analytics - Information is Power. Get detailed information on yout site visitor habits using a third party analytics application such as Google analytics. Examples of the kind of data your analytics account can yield includes data such as how long visitors stay on the site, whether they proceed to a new page or leave (bounce), how they found your site (organic / direct / via a 3rd party site), if they came via search engine (organic), which keyword they searched for. Using the information available to you by analytics will give you a basis to tweak and test your site to maximise the # of visitors you reach and to work on conversions.
• Banner Blindness / In content links – banner blindness is real. Eye-tracking studies have shown that web-site visitors almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad. This means that you shouldn’t overload your site with adverts, and should consider placing advertis in the middle of articles, as well as using text-links within content to maximise conversions and clicks.
• Banner to Content Match - One important consideration if you choose to use banners is to ensure that banners match the content of the page (i.e don’t put bingo banners on a poker page). Some affiliate systems allow affiliates to set up rotating banner groups which will show a number of unique (but related) banners in one spot on your site. Using these rotating groups will help you get a quantifiable idea of which banners work best with your content.
• Custom Creatives and Promotions from merchants – Poker / Casino / Bingo sites are happy to create bespoke banners for your site. These can mention a promotion being “exclusive for site X” etc, to lend credibility to your site and to point out value in promotions for players (who often assume that promotions are network-wide, and that they stand a snowball in hell’s chance of winning!). If you run a small online community (via forum or mailing list), leagues and competitions are a great way to get started with getting sign-ups, and encouraging your players to be loyal to a specific brand. For example, a small poker related forum might get a poker room to “sponsor” a small poker league, by starting with a freeroll, then some value added tournaments (this gets players a- depositing, b- using your trackers, and c- generating rake). Such promotions are an excellent way to attract new depositors and signups on your site because of the value and small fields. This concept can be re-applied to different niches and products.
• Get the Scoop, Get the traffic – Good for SEO and good for getting a lot of targeted traffic to your site is getting an exclusive story and publishing it before anyone else. If you have a good rapport with an AM, they might give you a 20 minute headstart before they publish important news (such as moving networks). If you publish an article on the subject and hit the major poker sites with a link to your story it is unlikely to be zapped as spam (as it’s an exclusive story!), and will result in a lot of targeted traffic which you can try to convert. Scoops are an excellent way to generate massive traffic spikes, and traffic = potential customers.
• Call to Action – The “call to action” is one of the most important concepts in marketing and promotion. In simple terms, once you’ve established that you have something of value to offer and that your site / company the perfect choice to deliver it, you want to ask your prospective customer to take the next step. You deliver a call to action.

  This may seem obvious, however it is very common to see a call to action ommitted in promotional articles on large gaming sites where rather than ending the promotional article with a call to action, the user is merely presented with a bunch of terms and conditions which could instead be linked to, and replaced with some copy which tells the user to sign up (for example the if the article is about a live poker tournament, the call to action could be: ” Satellites are running NOW! – click the download link to try your luck and get your $600 deposit bonus”.

• Implement a Mailing List – Developing a mailing list is of massive benefit to affiliates. Having targeted user mailing lists at your disposal means that special deals which crop up can be monetised quickly via one bulk email to potentially interested parties. The other up-side of having a mailing list is that you can bring information to the attention of potential customers without them having to visit your site!

  How do you generate a mailing list? One option is to have a “newsletter” sign-up form on your site, this may be incentivised (e.g. “subscribe to our newsletter and you might win a free trip to ‘Vegas in our monthly draw”). Another method of developing a good mailing list is to deploy a forum on your site (using free software for example phpBB, or commercial forum software like vBulletin). Plugins exist to implement newsletter subscription opt-in for common content management systems such as Wordpress (e.g. Sendblaster Newsletter Plugin) , allowing you to easily implement opt-in or non-opt in mailing lists with little or no technical knowledge.

• Buy Traffic from niche sites – so you own a poker bonus site, and know that a lot of your target customers hang out on biggest poker forum in the world, which sells ad-spots to interested parties.

  Purchasing some banner spots on the poker site will get you maximum exposure targeting people who may be interested in your product. It is better for 1,000 poker players (your target demographic) to see your banner than for 1,000 people on a gamer site to see your banner (even though advertising here might be a tad cheaper). Do the math, Keep an eye on conversions, banner views and clicks, and optimise your campaign or banners accordingly.

• Build a Brand – A brand is a name or TM connected with a product or producer.Brands have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy.Brand Loyalty exists when customers have a high attitude toward your brand (which is then exhibited through repurchase behavior). Brand loyalty is a great asset to any online or offline company: in many cases customers are willing to pay higher prices, they may cost less to serve, and can bring new customers to you. In the case of large gaming companies, branding is especially important as it can sometimes serve as the delivery mechanism for over 60% of web-traffic, whereas non-branded competitors will have to rely on other traffic acquisition mechanisms such as organic seo to drive a similar amount of traffic to their sites.
• Pay Per Click Advertising – PPC advertising on search engines such as Bing, Yahoo! and Google (adwords) (PPC on Google is only available in the UK for gambling related sites) is an excellent method of acquiring cheap traffic, depending on the keywords you wish to target. The most popular gambling keywords are known to be expensive (”short tail” keywords such as “Bingo”, “Poker”, “Casino” etc, however running a small budget test-campaign using some “long-tail keywords” (e.g. “Bingo in London”, “Order Casino Chips online”) often proves to be very profitable for many webmasters, and a PPC is certainly an attractive route to market for internet marketers, but also represents something which needs constant tweaking and optimisation in order to acquire good conversions on budget

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If you look at the SERPs for many of the top value gambling related keywords, you will find that the players in the top five results for many of the important keywords are not always gargantuan rich corporations. Why is this?

Well, Big gambling companies with hundreds of employees spread across the world (e.g.Betfair, Paddy Power. PokerStars, Betsson) are plentiful, and some of them own some of the top gambling keyword spots across the SERPs, but other organizations fail at non-brand SEO, losing lucrative positions to sites owned, developed and operated by lone SEO savvy individuals with some technical knowledge, and often a bit of some domain knowledge to boot.

Let us call distinguish the two entities – the “big corporation” on a SEO mission is Goliath, and the lone SEOer can be “David”.

Those who don’t know about big companies like Goliath’s might assume that Goliath can whoop David’s ass on the SERPs, just by being so highly budgeted. This is sometimes the case, but usually it is not.

Why SEO at Goliath Gambling Inc can be Tough

1. Red Tape: Companies like Goliath Gambling Inc are usually so big that any small SEO modification takes forever. In big companies with a modular design, things require justification, prioritisation, coder time, testing time, integration time, and so on. If Goliath has 20+ websites to administer for a bunch of different languages, expect even more time before the site is updated. So while Goliath’ Inc’ is caught up with red tape and internal processes, David logs into his CMS, makes the required changes, tests them and relaxes with a cup of tea.
2. CopyWriting costs: Companies like Goliath will pay up to six or seven times more than David will, for content. David writes his own content or hires domain experts (people who actually know about poker,casino,bingo,betting first hand) to write dirt-cheap content, saving time and money and resulting in better overall content quality which may result in higher conversions.
3. Translation is expensive : Goliath has to pay for content, and then get it translated into 20+ languages for his multi-language portal. Translation costs a lot more than content writing does. David is just targeting 1 language with his current site, and doesn’t have to worry about the global market.. for now.
4. Screw the Rich. Goliath has to pay for links and publicity because nobody gives a rich coporation anything for free or in way of barter or exchange, let alone cheap. David is a networker. Other webmasters and affiliates with whom he has networked on affiliate forums or at affiliate conferences will give David links, content and exposure because he is the little guy – people love to bet on the little guy.
5. SEO Team = Reactive, not pro-active – The SEO Team at Goliath spend 60% of their time fixing SEO problems (or fighting to get them fixed) which are created by Developers (technical) on >20 domains. Developers usually don’t know / care about SEO. David knows about SEO, and considers it in CMS design, use and maintenence and article writing and linkbuilding.
6. No Grassroots SEO Awareness: Goliath’s SEO team needs to convince everyone about the benefits of SEO: Management (to get fat budget+keep jobs), Technical (so they consider SEO and Accessibility with everything they do), Content Writers (to encourage them to Write copy with SEO in mind) and so on. David just gets on with SEOing on-site and off-site, and has nobody to answer to but himself.
7. Technical people are not so “Professional”: Companies like Goliath should have coders and developers who adhere to current industry standards, as a professional should. Of course, there are lots of exceptions and companies like Goliath seem to release new web-stuff suffering from outdated coding habits with a negative impact on SEO. David uses a CMS which is standards compliant
8. Goliath Online Marketing Management not SEO Savvy: Some SEOers working with big Goliath-like companies tell stories of asking for linkbuilding budgets and being requested to submit all of the links in advance so that marketing can confirm that the company will not be damaged by linking or association with the web-sites in question.

Okay, so BIG companies like Goliath may have a lot of issues to face due to their size and structure, however many of these bottlenecks and barriers can be overcome with a proper awareness of SEO at the top of the corporate chain. There are of course companies who have embraced SEO , on-site conversion testing, as well as Viral marketing SEO (Big-daddy poker company PokerStars springs to mind). Thankfully for the small affiliate (our David) – these well-oiled SEO-slick companies are few and far between – the reality is that most big online gambling companies are stymied by corporate structure and lack of SEO awareness at grass-roots level to realise maximum ROI in their their SEO campaigns, while our man David has a definite potential to compete well on the SERPs and in the marketplace with Goliath, and most probably has a big edge over Goliath in many SEO respects.

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Press Releases have long been a cost-effective way to promote your brands and gain some authority inbound-links, a useful addition to the link profile of any online web-site or business. This week, online press release distributor PRWeb has announced thatit will no longer permit companies in the online gaming niche to use their press release service.

PRWeb allows companies and individuals to submit press releases containing images, video, audio, and perhaps most importantly a number of hyperlinks to their system. Press releases are syndicated all over the internet yielding valuable exposure and backlinks for those who can afford to use the service. Those gambling companies and individuals with PRWeb accounts may now find that they have paid (a not unsubstantial fee) for subscription to a site they cannot use as they had intended.

The news is a setback for many in iGaming industry: many savvy companies have been using PRWeb successfully to build links to their sites for years. Other similar publishing services are available elsewhere, but often at a much greater cost. PRWeb is a trusted source, as far as the search-engines are concerned, with stories appearing quickly after submission all over the web, for example on Yahoo, Google News and other high profile and high traffic online industry portals. A massive amount of gaming related searches on Google Trends also show PRWeb releases, proof of the power and authority of the PRWeb press release.

The U.S. state of Washington (one of the states opposed to online gambing in North America) issued a cease and desist order requiring PRWeb to exclude iGaming business from its activities.

PRWeb representative Cari Lyle states that the company had no choice but to comply with the court order:

As PRWeb is located in Washington State, we are required to be in compliance with Washington State laws

Where will iGaming marketeers publish their press releases now?

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More and more big companies and individuals are using WordPress as their web-site CMSs, or for their company/personal blogs. Out of the box, it still needs some minor modifications and tweak, but with the right plugins, you can have a SEO friendly wordpress install in less than ten minutes.

There are a number of reasons for using Wordpress:

• WordPress is Free.
• WordPress takes a few minutes to install.
• WordPress is standards compliant
• WordPress is very functional out of the box (RSS support, Ping support)
• WordPress is easy to use for novices (WYSIWIG editor) and experts to set up/customise (templates, HTML, CSS) alike
• WordPress has a massive community of contributors, who develop free plug-ins to cater for your every need.
• Wordpress is open source, so you can edit it and customise it until it does what you need it to do

WordPress is pretty good SEO-wise, out of the box, but there are a number of steps you should take once you have installed WordPress in order to optimise your install for the search-engines.

Permalinks

The default permalinks in wordpress don’t contain search-engine-friendly keywords from your post or page titles (pages and posts are referred to by default using their ID, e.g. http://yoursite.com/?p=12345).

To make your URLs more friendly for both humans and the search-engines, go to Settings->Permalinks in your wp-admin control panel, and set your permalink structure to one of the following structures:

• /%postname%/
• /%category%/%postname%/

This will result in a more readable url, such as http://yoursite.com/hello-world or http://yoursite.com/uncategorised/hello-world>.

You will then be prompted to update your .htaccess file (simply paste the displayed text into the .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress folder, or if the file is writeable WordPress can do this for you).

Stop Words

Stop-Words (such as at, to, the, in) are usually ignored by search engines. Having these words in your post or page URLs is not good. Using a plugin such as SEO Slugs will remove these stop words from your permalinks/post slugs.

Page Titles

Page titles are an important factor in search engine listings.Since the page title is one of the few elements search engines can show search engine users before they visit your site, significant weight is placed on the words in the page title. If your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.

People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get a click from a search engine user. The Headspace plugin allows WordPress users to customise their page titles to include the site name after the page title, as well as other title orders (including tags, categories etc). HeadSpace enables you to override the Headspace settings on a per-post/page basis in order to write optimised titles for each specific post, giving you full control over your title tags. Headspace also allows customisation of the “Read more” text, allowing you to add a more search-engine friendly anchor text to the read-more link.

Descriptions

Categories should be given a reasonable description if you use category pages (so that the category page itself has some unique content, rather than links to category pages and snippets of the page contents). Using the HeadSpace plugin to add the description to the meta description is also a good idea.

You should also add descriptive text for each post or page that you add to your blog or site, rather than using autogenerated descriptions (which usually grab the first few lines of a post as the description, not good considering the first few lines won’t adequately convey the content of the page, nor contain the keywords which you want to rank for). Descriptions entice people to visit the page, so make sure your description field conveys what’s in the page, and gets the user to click on the link!

Images

Images should be marked up with suitable alternative text attributes. If you have an image of a blue poker chip, add alt=”blue poker chip” to the image. Search engines cannot read images, so make sure to specify good alt-text descriptions for images in your img tags, this includes images of text which you might use for graphically styled headings/sections on your site!

Using Alt tags not only assists those users using assistive technology such as braille displays, screen-readers and text-only browsers – but also gives valuable information to the search engines, and may help you get targeted visitors to your site via image searches (on sites such as Google Images).

Templates

Some of the template files in your WordPress theme make a number of database queries when they are interpreted. If you site / blog gets a lot of traffic, minimising the number of queries generated by templates is an important part of optimising your site for speed.

Examples of optimising the header include inserting the lang attribute into your header will save on 1 query (getting and inserting this information from the database), similarly you can specify your html type, stylesheet location and make other information static to save on processing. The header template also contains some calls for data which can be explicitly specified, e.g. your blog / site title.

Caching

Installing a WordPress caching plugin like wp-super-cache will assist in reducing the work your WordPress installation must perform.

SiteMaps / XML sitemaps

Autogenerated Sitemaps are useful for your visitors, and using a plugin means you have access to the source to customise it as you please. The WordPress Sitemap Generator Plugin is highly customisable from the WordPress admin panel.

Summary

Out of the box, WordPress is highly functional and can be optimised in every aspect via some minor edits and the installation of a selection of SEO Plugins. Above I outlined a number of useful plugins and considerations for web-developers / SEOers to optimise their sites for visitors and search engines.

Please feel free to share any SEO tips, useful plugins or template modifications which you use to improve your WordPress seach engine optimzation.

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