I wanted to write an article about using keywords in your articles or news for SEO purposes. In such a competitive SEO market for poker affiliates, this is critical.

Of course we all think about this, but it still amazes me when I see some poker affiliates or even regular webmasters that miss the boat on this topic.

When writing articles or news stories on your websites you have to have a plan before you just "throw content onto your site".  Now I am no SEO expert but I have learned a hell of a lot from my mentors in regards to this subject.  When you're thinking about writing an article or adding content, one of the best tools you can use is the Overture Keyword Tool.  Take the general term you are writing about and look at the various terms that are also being searched.  The odds are you will not come close to be ranked for the actual keyword.  Why not go for one of the terms that is 3rd or 4th down the list?

Regardless of what you are going for, you need to plant the proper title on your page as well as the right meta tags and content.  Likewise are you even thinking about or using H1 tags? There are still markets where primary keywords can drive a great amount of traffic with minimal efforts.  Unfortunately the poker affiliate market is not one of them.  You could spend all your efforts for months doing link exchanges for "Online Poker", and you will never touch the top 5 pages in Google.  Imagine if instead you spent your efforts doing keyword research and going after twenty terms.  Even if each of those twenty terms only bring you 20 unique hits a month, that's still 400 unique visitors that you wouldn't have gotten had you been getting back links and anchor text to "Online Poker"

Also there was a recent post on PAW about content being king, and this is very true.  If you can have hundreds of pages on your site or sites about various topics, you will find much more success than focusing all your efforts on that one keyword.  Many of the older and experienced poker affiliates realize this and have dedicated their time to adding content on a daily basis and going after a whole myriad of terms.

Another key to SEO on your sites which most affiliates don't do is inter-linking.  Hopefully everyone realizes that google spiders your site and goes from page to page.  So if you have a great article on a niche subject, why would you not throw links with good anchor text all around your site? To many of us get caught up on googlebot following links with anchor text from other people's sites, what about giving googlebot the bait from our own site.  If you have a page that ranks very well or gets lots of traffic, you should be linking to your next page from there that you also want to get ranked well.  Very few webmasters do this and quite honestly I shouldn't even be publishing this.

Another tip, if your target keyword has to do with "poker odds", you will be much better off with a backlink from another websites PR3 page that is about "poker odds" than their homepage that is PR4.  Yes, page rank is important, but you also want to have incoming links from pages with similar content.  Obviously one of PAW's target keywords is Poker Affiliate Programs, but many of our best links are not on homepages.

When adding content or new pages, add a backlink to somewhere else on your site within the content.  Your left menu links or sitewide footer links are great, but you will see much better results by interlinking to and from pertinent pages within your site.  Likewise do your research and think about the keywords you are targeting when publishing a new web page.  Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail.

Jeremy