How To Build A Poker Web Site

Recently I ran across the ultimate SEO plugin for WordPress, which oddly enough is titled SEO Ultimate. As with any plugin you simply click the “add new” section under “plugins” then do a quick search for “SEO Ultimate” find it, install it, and activate it. Now what makes this plugin so amazing is the number of different options it has available for webmasters to improve their on page strategies.

Yes, I am removing my backing for All in One SEO and now placing my backing behind this wonderful (and free) plugin. You get the same useful meta tag features for your posts and pages, as well as the option to insert global meta tags and descriptions right out of the box.

But what really sets this thing apart from any other plugin that I’ve seen thus far on the WordPress.org directory is the Deep Link Juggernaut. This one piece of technology will comb through all your new posts (yes sorry it won’t go through your old post and work its magic, at least I haven’t figured out how to do so yet anyways) and automatically link words or phrases that you have pre-selected to specific destinations of your choosing. Think about it like this, if I wanted the word poker to always link to say Poker money clips dot com then this plugin would do that for me (I didn’t really do that which is why you don’t see the link, that was just an example.) Or I could set a limit on the number of times it actually posts a link per page so I don’t look like some sort of spam farm.

You can do the same for your affiliate links as well. Let’s say that you’re promoting some sort of poker calculator and want the phrase “poker calculator” to link to your new affiliate link each and every time you use the phrase. Instead of having to do this manually SEO Ultimate will do it for you, leaving you more time to simply write content.

Just pick the words you want to use, set it up once and forget about it. Each time you add a new post to your website it’ll do all the work for you, just like magic. If used correctly you could easily increase your on page SEO strategy as well as a put a few extra bucks into your pocket at the same time.

If you’re having trouble finding it on your own here’s the link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-ultimate/

WordPress and a simple plugin – All in One SEO – will handle the majority of your on page poker SEO efforts for you. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and is the practice of getting a website to rank in search engines such as Google for a specific term. Let’s quickly go over what on page search engine optimization consists of and how WordPress does most of this work for you.

The first thing search engines look for are your keywords in your URL. The url is simply the file name of your website. This page’s url is http://howtobuildapokerwebsite.com/on-page-seo/. Now if you followed the instructions on making WordPress SEO friendly then this will automatically be done for you each and every time you create a post.

The next element is handled by the plugin All in One SEO. When you’re writing a new post or page you will have options at the bottom of your “Add New” posts and pages. Here you can type in your post or page’s title, a description and the keywords related to your post or page. Want the quick and easy way to do this? Simply copy the title you are using for your post and copy it into the title section of All in One SEO. For the description I typically just copy the first few sentences of my post. The keywords I choose I always put in the post tags section.

OK, so what makes a good title? A good title is targeting 2-3 keywords or phrases at a time. This post for example is targeting On Page SEO, and SEO. I’m also targeting poker seo at the same time as this website is after all about poker. Now in all seriousness this website stands little to no chance of ranking for my chosen keywords, at least not in it’s current state, but that’s OK, it’s a long term strategy. For now this is just being used as an example.

So how do you know what keywords to use that will actually generate traffic? You could spend a lot of money on tools to do the checking for you or you could always just use this Google Search Tool. This tool will tell you the number of searches per month for a specific keyword as well as the competition level and your expected Adwords cost if you decide to pay for traffic (whole other topic, one I won’t be covering on this website.) So now we know the competition levels for your selected keywords and can create a post or page around it.

So what makes a good description? Well, All in One SEO takes care of the length for you as search engines don’t like anything over 160 characters. Typically you should use your keywords or phrases somewhere within your description so the search engines know that is what your post is about.

What about keywords? To be honest, Google no longer uses this because of bad people on the internet trying to rank for words that aren’t even in their pages. Other search engines still do so it’s a good idea to use it anyway. As suggested whatever keywords you use should also be your post tags. Please only use keywords that are actually in your article.

Now how about the meat of the page, the content? Well, you want to write for people, not search engines first and foremost. If you write quality stuff that is readable people will tell their friends about your website and you’ll grow without the help of the SE’s. But being that you also want to be found online, you should use your keywords a few times throughout your post or page. Don’t overdo it though, as that’s bad. Rule of thumb is somewhere in the 2% to 4% range. If you wrote a 500 word post, that’d be something like 3-4 times for the phrase.

One quick word of warning on All in One SEO – the default setting uses both your posts title and your website’s title as the title that search engines see. If you want to rank for a poker related term and already have poker in your main site title it might be better to drop the term poker out all together. Example – Your website’s title is Poker Strategies and you want to write a post about poker tips. Best to just call it “Tips” as your title will then be “Tips | Poker Strategies.”

So let’s cover an imaginary post real quick so you have an idea of exactly what I’m talking about. Let’s write a post about “The Poker Brat Phil Hellmuth.” That’s the title. Keywords targeted? Poker, the poker brat, and Phil Hellmuth are the three, so that would also be our keywords and post tags. Your first sentence could be something along the lines of “The Poker Brat, known to his mom and dad as Phil Hellmuth Jr. is an eleven time world series bracelet winner and is sponsored by Ultimate Bet.” That’s 142 characters, which is perfect for the description as well as an opening sentence for the post. That’s basically all there is to on page search engine optimization.

You want people to find your website right? Well it’s not going to happen very quick if all your posts are left the way WordPress comes installed (yoursite.com/?p=2). The main factors of on page search engine optimization are as follows – site title which you learned how to change in a previous lesson, page title (the title of your posts), using header tags (which is taken care of you when you title your posts), and the url of your web page.  Let’s change those url’s from something ugly to something the search engines will love shall we…

For starters log into your WordPress dashboard.

Go down to “Settings” and click on “Permalinks.”

Now go down to where it says “Custom Structure.” There are two ways to pull this off. One would be simply typing in the WordPress code to change all urls to the name or you can simply click on “day and name” then backspace a portion of it.

As you can see the code looks like this “/%postname%/”. Once you have that in your custom structure box with the button checked simply scroll down to “Save Changes” and click the button. If you’d like you can also insert the category code into your custom structure like this “/%category%/” so the final display would read “/%category%/%postname%/” although this can get messy when trying to name pages….. Example – You have a category called poker and your title is “Poker Hands.” The url would look something like this – yoursite.com/poker/poker-hands/. I leave the choice up to you on whether or not you want to use the category permalink section. I never do, some experts say you should.

At some point you’re going to want your site to say something other than “My Blog – Just Another Wordpress Blog.” Changing this is as easy as 1.2.3. All right let’s get down to it.

When you are logged into your dashboard (also known as your admin panel) you will see a series of links on the left hand side of the page. You want to go down to the section labeled “Settings” and click on it.

You will now see a series of links. Click on the one labeled “General.”

You can now change both the title and Tag Line of your blog. Choose something unique for your title. In the case of this website the title is “How To Build A Poker Web Site” and the Tagline is “Free Web Design, Poker SEO, and much more.”

Now simply scroll to the bottom and click “Save Changes” and you’re all done.