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SEO: Search Engine Optimization
Internet Marketing, when done right, can be exceptionally cost-effective – but how can your web site stand out from the billions of other gaming sites? SEO expert Christopher Angus explains…
The online gambling/casino industry is no doubt an exciting place to be these days, what with the rate of growth it’s currently experiencing, combined with its potential to increase even more. Many other businesses are also making the transition from physical offices to a major online presence, often opting to maintain both simultaneously. So, with more and more people becoming increasingly active in the online realm, there has never been a more important time for casinos to be sitting up and taking notice of establishing a firm online presence.
Due to the propensity of casinos establishing themselves online, it is no surprise that money is being moved from supplying traditional forms of gambling and instead being used to develop online gambling. The money goes where the business is, and over the years business has been booming on the internet, with profits and growth expected to continue, and with the online gambling industry being worth an estimated $528 billion by the year 2015, according to experts.
With both current and projected growth like this, the online gambling industry is nothing to be ignored and is certainly no shrinking violet. With the right skills and proper initiative, you can take control of this exciting emerging marketplace and Internet Marketing is one of the ways in which you can capitalise on this rapid expansion that the gaming/casino industry is experiencing.
Essentially, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is important for any online business (not least of all the online gambling industry) because if you’re going to be operating on the internet, you need to establish some kind of online presence before you can expect to have any real sway in the industry, and before your ideas can really take flight. Also, this goes double for the online gambling industry, as thanks to the immense surge in popularity; it needs to be able to compete with other more established online industries, to be able to stand on its own two feet, so to speak.
So how does it work? Well, SEO is the process via which a website is improved in terms of internet traffic and natural – or “organic” – search engine results. Less technically, it involves improving your website in terms of traffic, business and overall productivity.
An outline of the benefits that a solid Internet Marketing campaign can bring include:
• High ROI – Perhaps the most important aspect of SEO/Internet marketing, as everyone is always eager to learn that they will get a Return On Investment from anything they put into a business or marketing venture. With a marketing campaign like this, you can expect a return which is 2-3 times greater than traditional media.
• It’s long-term – It doesn’t just stop working like a short-lived advertising campaign. The positive effects of SEO can be felt throughout a site for a few years and can provide the industry with that much-needed boost as well as being able to prolong the effects of such a boost.
• It’s a form of marketing that never sleeps – It entitles you to 24/7 promotion and positioning in internet search rankings. SEO is always functioning and always on the go, it doesn’t stop and keeps on improving the target website all hours of the day and not just when the “target audience” is awake. Because – like the internet – it never rests, it’s always pushing forwards, and for an emerging industry like the online game/gambling industry, its constant effect is just the thing that’s needed: Something that works all the time and not just during a specific time-frame.
• Targeted traffic – This brand of marketing drives the target crowd to the website in the form of people actively looking for it. In other words, the traffic that’s wanted most will be the traffic that comes right to the website in question. And we all know that – especially for the gambling/casino market – traffic (and targeted traffic at that) is a great thing, as it can rapidly translate into Real Money Players.
• Increased brand visibility and increased sales – As SEO is also a form of marketing, it’s all about attracting attention to the brand and getting it noticed (thus drawing in visitors/customers) in as many ways as possible (positive ways, of course!), and anyone can tell you that increased promotion and brand awareness will most often result in more visitors and therefore more business, allowing the cycle of promotion and increased sales to increase exponentially, something that all businesses and not just the online casino industry can benefit from.
Via the process of making a website search engine friendly, it also undergoes many a subtle change, resulting overall in an incredibly beneficial transformation. The website in question will often undergo a process to make it more user-friendly and accessible, as well as being more easily navigable by search engines and their robots. This in turn also contributes to an increase in sales or at least an increase in brand/product awareness and high ROI.
Taking those things in mind, some ways in which you can improve a website’s standing is to first of all start with the URL. Making sure you have a URL that properly matches up with what your website is aiming to do is the first step in ranking incredibly well in the search engine results pages. For example, if you were to apply this to the casino industry, then a URL like www.poker.com is going to help you rank a lot quicker and a lot better than if your URL was www.gamblingcardgame.com. As well as this, another tactic that helps to boost a website’s potential is to obtain direct links to the pages (typically the homepage) of the website. It’s these links that will help the website to rank well for certain keywords, so for example, if you wanted to rank well for the term “poker cards”, you would have to go about obtaining a number of links on other websites that would then in turn link back to your site, using “poker cards” as the anchor text. These are just a couple of the tricks of the trade that SEO uses to increase the effectiveness of a website.
The marketing strategies that Internet Marketing provides are vital to the emerging online gambling industry as this is a specific marketing method targeted at increasing the potential of businesses wishing to improve their standing in the online universe. SEO is borne of the internet and Search Engines, so is therefore the best when it comes to dealing with it in ways that conventional marketing strategies may find difficult. Strong internet businesses (especially ones in relative infancy) need strong internet marketing, which is why SEO – together with the online games/casino/ gambling industry – is on the verge of accomplishing something truly great and smashing all boundaries and expectations previously held for businesses in the past, and great businesses have been founded on the back of great SEO. Together, we can rule the world, and – best of all – nobody gets hurt.
Christopher Angus is a well-known SEO and internet marketer. He has worked for some of the biggest brands in gambling and finance. He can be contacted at chris@seocompanyuk.com or via http://www.seocompanyuk.com
