Webmaster Support: SEO / Conversions
At UnibetAffiliates, we appreciate the importance of guiding and supporting new and old affiliates so that they may maximise their potential revenues, search-engine rankings as well as conversions. This page offers some tips to help webmasters to realise their potential in these respects.
As always, If you have any specific questions regarding conversion optimisation or Search Engine Optimisation, please contact us and we will endeavour to help you improve your site.
10 Top SEO tips for Affiliates
High search engine positions for target keywords is important for webmasters. Having a shop with no visitors often means low potential earnings; the same principle applies to running a web-site.
The higher your position for your target keywords, the higher the traffic you will generally get, given enough demand.
The number 1 spot on a search engine for a given keyword will represent around 42% of all traffic for that keyword, whereas being listed 10th for that same keyword will yield around 3% of the total traffic for that keyword- clearly it is advantageous to rank as high as possible.
Here we present ten tips for gambling affiliate webmasters to improve their search engine results page positioning:
- Externalize all scripts and Styles – Moving CSS and JavaScript files off the page (but including them by reference) accomplishes two goals: firstly, it creates cleaner code that is more easily maintained (if you want to edit a script or stylesheet you only need to do it in once location).
Most importantly, this act means that search engines are reading the real content you wish them to index, rather than information concerned with presentation etc. Remember that search engine spiders only spider a variable amount of your page – there is no guarantees that the whole page will be indexed, therefore it makes great sense to keep the markup (html code, under the hood) as “clean” as possible
- URL Structure – URLs should be structured so that they contain the keywords which you wish to target in you article or page, for example If you are selling red rabbits, the ideal URL structure is yoursite.com/red-rabbits
- On-Page Keyword Integration – Your target keywords should occur naturally in your content: in the title tag, ideally in the h1 tag, in the first few lines of the page body, and sparsely and naturally in the remaining page copy. Keyword stuffing is a BAD idea, as overuse of keywords or over-optimised pages may cause search engines to discount your content as SPAM.
- Keyword In Domain Name – Many SEO experts agree that having your keywords in your domain name provides benefit in ranking for your term. E.g. if selling red bananas, a domain such as “http://freeredbananas.com” will rank better for “red bananas” than an identical domain with the domain-name “http://freshfruit.com”
- Supply and Demand – Keyword Research – Use some keyword tools such as the Google keyword Tool to identify demand for keywords (as well as for suggestions of related keywords with small demand, which can still bring in valuable traffic!).
Long tail keywords represent low-hanging fruit in regards to traffic acquisition and can be used to generate large traffic volumes without much competition.
- Find a niche, Start Small!- Attacking the short tail keywords (e.g “Poker”, “casino”) rather than long-tail keywords (e.g. “Casino games in London”) with a new site is going to be hard, especially in high competition niches such as gambling, finance etc.
Identifying and targeting a sub-niche allows you to focus on developing good content as well as getting traffic and authority for that niche. Once you have some good rankings and traffic from Google/Y!/Bing, it will be easier to rank for related content outside of the sub-niche.
- Internal Structure - It is important to specify your web-site content optimally, using the appropriate markup for structure (headings, lists, sub-headings), meta data (description, keywords, title).
- Analytics – Analysing your visitor habits is important. Free analytics tools are available (e.g. Google Analytics) which allow webmasters to identify keywords which brought visitors to the site, the most popular content, bounce rates of particular pages as well as a wealth of other useful statistics.
Google Analytics also allows webmasters to configure goals (such as registrations or sales), to track user progress through multi-step procedures which represent value to the webmasters (e.g. Goals allow webmasters to track user progress and abandonment during the steps leading up to a sale). Webmasters can also get long-tail data from Webmaster Tools’ Top search queries report.
- Linking – Links to your site should be acquired from relevant and well-ranked web-pages to your content. A link from a relevant site far outweighs the benefits of a link from a non-related page.
The importance of a page / site which links to you is also a factor, so try to get links from authority sites, or those with reasonably high Google Pagerank.
- Content – “Content is King” has been a long-time catchphrase in the SEO niche, due to the fact that search engines like to spider unique content.
If your site is dedicated to bananas and has 1,000 articles in some way or other related to bananas, and your competitor has a similar site with 1/4 the amount of articles on the subject, it is likely that your site will rank better (assuming both sites have the same power of inbound links coming in).
Good content also breeds linkability: if something is good, people will naturally link to you, resulting in more traffic as well as more inbound links which will assist in ranking your site for terms related to your content.
10 tips for Affiliates to Increase Conversions
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 we 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 most importantly conversions – and optimise your campaign and/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.
