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Theme Pyramids for Poker Affiliate Sites
What's the best way to organize a poker affiliate site? Especially in terms of search engine optimization? This is a guide for beginner webmasters to help them put together a logical structure for a website. (Experienced webmasters might know all this stuff already.)
One problem a lot of new poker webmasters have when designing their first website is organizing the information on the site, particularly from the perspective of making a site that can grow its content in an organic and natural way. And search engines take into account the structure of your site as a whole when they rank the individual pages. (That's part of the latent semantic indexing process, IMO.)
The aim of this article is to describe one way of organizing a poker website's information called theme pyramids. Much of my thinking about this was influenced by an article on WebmasterWorld about theme pyramids and SEO. I highly recommend reading that article too.
The first step in creating a theme pyramid is decide what your website is about. Some webmasters recommend NOT making a website about "poker" to begin with, since that's such a broad subject, but I think it might not be a bad idea to start one very general site about "poker" and another more niche-targeted site about a more narrow subject, perhaps "seven card stud".
What your site is about is also what you would call the site's theme.
The individual pages of your site would become sub-categories of that theme, and those sub-categories would also have sub-categories, and so on, until you've formed a "pyramid" with one main page at the top of the pyramid and several pages for sub-categories underneath that, and each sub-category would also have several pages for sub-categories underneath it.
An example of some sub-categories of the theme "poker" might include:
- Poker Rules
- Poker Chips
- Poker Games
- Poker Strategy
- Poker Rooms
An example of some sub-categories for the theme "seven card stud" might be:
- Seven Card Stud Rules
- Seven Card Stud Games
- Seven Card Stud Strategy
- Where to Play Seven Card Stud
- Books About Seven Card Stud
I think 5 to 10 sub-categories for a first website should be plenty.
Then each of the sub-categories gets sub-categories, like this:
Poker Rules
- Texas Holdem Rules
- Seven Card Stud Rules
- Omaha Rules
- 5 Card Draw Rules
And "Texas Holdem Rules" could have sub-categories for no limit holdem rules, pot limit holdem rules, and limit holdem rules. "Seven Card Stud Rules" could have sub-categories for seven card stud high-low and for low or high chicago.
"Where to Play Seven Card Stud" could have sub-categories of places both online and offline you can play seven card stud. And then for each page under that pyramid, you could list a specific online or land-based cardroom along with an article about the cardroom.
A semi-completed theme pyramid in outline form might look something like this:
I. Seven Card Stud��
����A. Seven Card Stud Rules
��������1. Seven Card Stud High Low Rules
��������2. Seven Card Stud Low and High Chicago rules
����B. Seven Card Stud Strategy
��������1. Starting Hands Strategy
��������2. Strategy on 4th Street
��������3. Strategy on 5th Street
��������4. Strategy on 6th Street
��������5. Strategy on 7th Street
��������6. The�Importance of Playing "Live" cards
����C. Where to Play Seven Card Stud�
������� 1. Offline
����������� a. California Cardrooms
����������� b. Vegas Cardrooms
����������� c. etc. etc.
������� 2. Online
����������� a. Party Poker
����������� b. Ultimate Bet
����������� c. Paradise Poker
����������� d. etc etc
If you remember high school or college English class, you'll recognize this as a pretty standard outline form. And that's exactly what it is. But it's useful, because it organizes the information on your website in a way that makes sense to your users and to the search engines. (Assuming you've done it correctly.)
What do you do with these sub-categories once you have them though? That's the easy part. Every category, sub-category, and sub-sub-category gets a 500 - 1000 word article written on it.
Use headings, sub-headings, and bullet points to give an online reader's eyes places to stop
Don't have paragraphs that are more than 5 lines long.
Interlink your articles together where appropriate.
Generating a 100, 200, or 500 page content-filled website becomes easy when you generate a theme pyramid first. The process becomes a matter of "filling in the blanks".
Here's an example from my site, going from general to specific:
My home page is about the subject of online poker rooms. One of the sub-categories of that topic is Party Poker, which IS an online poker room. And a sub-category or sub-topic of Party Poker is Party Poker's Bad Beat Jackpots.
I hope those examples clarify what I'm talking about when I talk about theme pyramids. It's just a matter of going from a general topic at the top levels of your site to specific topics on the interior pages of your site.
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Jun 17, 2008
