Having an online presence is very, nope, extremely competitive nowadays. There are over 3.5 billion searches per day on Google, and everyone wants to be noticed, whether it is by the users or the search engine itself.
This means that you have to stand out among the crowd to seize the attention of the right audiences at the right time. Especially when you want to rank a casino or sports betting affiliate website in this extremely competitive environment.
In our previous article, “How to rank higher on Google Search Results | A Beginner’s Guide (Part 1),” we talked about the importance and usage of the three basic factors; Content, Page Speed and Mobile-friendliness to boost up your Google ranking.
Now in this one, we are going to discuss a few more topics that are more technical to help you get a higher ranking on google search:
1. Placing Keywords in the Right Place
Keywords and SEO are like two inseparable terms. One can’t simply exist without another. If you want to climb your way up to the top of SERPs, knowing where to place the target keywords is as equally important as understanding which keywords to focus on.
Apart from the main body of the article, you can add keywords in areas like:
Meta Title
Meta title is the first impression people see before clicking on your link. It can appear in three places: SERP, browser tab, social media shares. It is seen as the first blue sentence of each search results.
Meta description
As for the meta description, it is a very short summary of the whole article. It is better to have a customized description for each blog with targeted keywords.
Google will then make any relevant keywords bold, so it is easier for people to scan through and decide if the article/page is relevant or not. In the above image, the keyword is ‘online gambling,’ and you will see the bold keywords in the meta description.
The reason we include keywords in meta title and meta description is, according to Google, purely for better user experience. Google says it doesn’t decide the ranks based on them (at least not directly), but what it actually cares about is SEO-friendly permalinks. They’re definitely a decision-making factor for your potential readers/customers whether they want to click on your link or not. But read on below…
Permalink
Permalink is a full URL of a page that is used by Google as one of the ranking factors. Aim for a relevant and concise title that is rich in keywords. Again, it doesn’t necessarily have to be exactly the same as the meta title or the actual blog title.
According to Matthew Barby, having keywords in the URLs and title have a massive impact on Google ranking which contradicts Google’s own statements. So always take them with a grain of salt. You can see the stats in the picture below:
2. A sense of security: HTTPS
HTTPS has been one of Google’s ranking factors ever since 2014. According to an update released by Google in July 2018, “81 of the top 100 sites on the web use HTTPS by default”. This data set explains how important having a secure website is to rank high on Google.
Google has also started flagging all the non-HTTPS sites as “insecure” since then. That’s definitely not gonna be impressive to your users if you still haven’t enabled HTTPS encryption for your website.
Generally speaking, a secure site is the one whose URL starts with HTTPS (instead of the usual HTTP), and yes ‘S’ stands for “secure”. It encrypts all the communication exchanged between your website and the user’s browser.
Think of it as adding another layer of security to your website so that hackers won’t be able to steal your confidential data (login credentials, billing information, etc.) easily.
To enable HTTPS connection, you just need to buy an SSL certificate from any SSL certificate provider and install it on your website. If you already have an SSL certificate, it is even better! You can test the security level of your SSL certificate with the Qualys SSL Labs Tool, as recommended by Google.
3. Strong Website Architecture
Google regularly sends out spiders to discover new or updated pages and crawl their data. A clean, simple site architecture will definitely help those little spiders crawl your website data easily. In this way, your web pages will be indexed and ranked faster.
Here are a few simple steps that you can do to achieve that:
- Optimize and Submit your sitemap: A sitemap is a file that contains a list of pages that are available on your website. It is either in HTML or XML file type.
Think of it as a map to help Google crawl your website without getting lost. The clearer the map is, easier the navigation will be. If you already have one, don’t forget to submit it to the Google Search Console. If you don’t have one yet, you can use any of the sitemap generators available online!
- Neat Categorization (Siloing): If your blog covers various topics of the iGaming industry, try categorizing them according to the main topics, e.g. Online Gambling Tips, iGaming industry updates, Online Casino Reviews, etc.
In this way, Google spiders can easily discover fresh content. Ideally, it shouldn’t take more than 3-4 clicks to reach any part of your website. Here is how simple navigation should be: Homepage > Insights > Blog > Post ‘A’.
4. Earning and Giving Backlinks
Matthew Barby has boldly said that the more backlinks you have, the higher your rank will be. It is also one of the ranking factors that a lot of Digital Marketers swear by.
When a website gets an incoming link from another website, it is called ‘backlink’. Ok, but why is it so important?
Earning organic backlinks from other websites is a signal to Google that your content is high-quality, informative and reliable. This also helps Google bots to crawl your pages easily. Hence, this kind of content tends to rank higher in search results.
Here is a diagram from Moz that perfectly explains what a backlink is:
We have briefly talked about how important it is to get backlinks for your pages but here’s the catch. Some backlinks are actually more valuable than the others. That value depends on trustworthiness, popularity and domain authority of the websites that backlinks came from. At the same time, backlinks coming from low-authority spammy websites will hurt your ranking.
If you are operating an online casino, always check the quality and professionalism of the affiliate sites you choose to work with. At the same time, iGaming affiliate websites should write quality content (or get it written) and maintain the reputation to earn the trust of potential clients.
5. Domain Age and Authority
Domain Authority (DA): Moz defined Domain Authority as “a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.”
This means that if you are competing for the same keyword(s) with your competitors, a page with relatively higher domain authority will rank higher than that of a lower one.
You can check your domain authority as well as page authority and other metrics using Moz’s Link Explorer or any other SEO analysis tools that you prefer.
Domain Age: Yes, you now have some tricks up your sleeve to boost up your ranking, but you can’t suddenly pop up on the first page just because you have tweaked here and there. According to an Ahref’s study from two million pages, the average age of the top 10 pages on Google is more than 2 years.
This shows that ranking #1 on Google just doesn’t happen overnight. So, don’t feel lost or demotivated if you can’t see immediate results. A LOT OF patience, hard work, and dedication you will slowly but surely move your way up to the top.
To conclude, what we have covered in both Part 1 and Part 2 is merely scratching the surface. Our real aim here is to make you aware of all the baby steps that you can do to achieve a good ranking that you actually deserve.
Header Image Source: Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
How did you like May Thawdar Oo’s blog post? Let us know in the comments if you have anything to add, have another content idea for iGaming blog posts, or just want to say “hello.” 🙂
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