Rob Kerry from Ayima – Gambling / Gaming SEO
The gaming world is probably the most competitive niche in SEO – esp poker and casinos.
There is no secret sauce as there used to be e.g. with old link networks beingburned. Rob shows a graph of search volume and est clickthrough
888 vs William Hill – #1 and #4 respectively. Both are similar in terms of optimisation, but it is their backlinks that separates them. Rob uses a similar process to Dave Naylor to rank links according to anchor text, class C IPs and other metrics like PR.
Once you have dominated your particular market, as an example casino in the UK, why not think about branching out into other countries, for example France. Why not take a look at backlink comparisons to check out a few of the top ranked sites in France. The main conclusion is that you should always use a subfolder and not a subdomain because with a subdomain you are starting from scratch. You can register a subfolder to a different country within Google Webmaster Tools – so do that. Rob expanded on this more in the Q&A – it is much easier, quicker and cheaper to use a subfolder on a generic TLD to rank for really competitive keyphrases in different countries, compared with building up authority from scratch on different (sub)domains.
My summary:
This was an excellent session as expected with such top class speakers, all so experienced that if you let them talk for any amount of time there’s going to be valuable stuff for anybody who is into Search Engine Optimisation to soak up. The main concern is that all the talks are so short that unfortunately all the speakers have to cram all of their suggestions into bullet points and it doesn’t always work. It’s so easy to get lost with all this information and for it to go in one ear and out the other! I would think I will be perusing the slides when they are finally released and having a chat to the speakers in the pub with a few pints!
I’m not sure what the next big conference will be about, hopefully they will have one dedicated solely to Web Design in the not too distant future.