Theme Pyramids for Poker Affiliate Sites

by inga posted Oct 11th 2005 at 22:00PM

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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.