PlayWinningPoker.com Case Study
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URL: www.PlayWinningPoker.com |
| PR: 5 | |
| Est: 2000 |
Overview
PlayWinningPoker (PWP from now on) is a powerhouse when it comes to content and SEO. Steve Badger is the owner if the site, and has been running it for a good number of years. Over this time, he has written literally hundreds of pages for the site, with almost every one of them ranking well in Google. If you type in any poker strategy related search term in Google, it’s likely that you will find PWP in the top 10 somewhere.
PWP has had the advantage of entering the poker affiliate market when it was far less competitive. Therefore it was able to bring in more traffic from the start and make money more quickly than sites starting today. However, this site is still a great example of how good content (and lots of it!) and SEO are the key to success in this industry.
Design
For such a big and popular poker portal, you will probably be surprised at the design of the site. In fact, the site goes against a number of poker website design tips that I have advised on this site.
There is nothing flashy about the site at all; it is completely simple and basic. The advantage of this however is that having a simple site design reduces the amount of code on the page, which speeds up the loading time and increases the number of unique words on each page. Therefore Google will have a better understanding of the pages when it crawls them, which will help in getting the pages to rank as highly as possible.
One major compromise of the PWP design is that it doesn’t seem to have a concrete navigation structure. Links on the sidebar seem to chop and change from page to page, which can make it difficult to browse around the site to try and find the information you are looking for. In my opinion, good navigation should be at the core of a site design, and PWP could certainly be improved if it had a more user-friendly navigation.
Throughout this site we advise against using flashy banners, yet on PWP such banners are abundant throughout the pages. Flashing banners convert a much smaller percentage of players than static images and text links. However, if you have thousands of visitors to your site every day like PWP has, you will still see a significant number of conversions overall.
Whilst having flashy banners may work for an established site with lots of traffic, it is advised that you use as fewer flashing banners as possible, and stick to using static images and text links. If you have a new site, you will not have many visitors to work with, so you will want to keep the conversion rate as high as possible and squeeze out as many RMPs as you can.
Content
PWP is easily one of the biggest poker portals around, with over 1000 pages to its name. With so many pages, the site can do a lot of damage in the search engines, and keep visitors browsing around the site for hours.
The content is usually well structured, and is clear to read on the page. However, one problem with the font is that it is entirely in bold. The problem with this is the site is unable to highlight any part of the text to emphasize a point, or use bolding to highlight keywords for SEO purposes. Therefore it is not recommended that you use a bold font for your main content, so stick to standard font weight when writing your articles.
PWP does not focus on any poker niche in particular, as it provides information on all the different poker variants under the sun. Because PWP is such an authority site, it can afford to do this and rank well for a multitude of terms. However, as a new affiliate you should try to focus on one niche, rather than provide information across the board. It will be far more difficult to rank well for a broad range of common poker terms than if you specifically focus on providing content for one particular niche.
SEO
Along with boatloads of quality content, PWP also has an awesome on-page SEO strategy. With the site being low on code, Google is able to easily crawl the page and understand what each page is about. Therefore with perfect title tags, h1 tags, h2 tags, meta tags and such, every page is clear to Google about the information it provides.
Because there are so many quality pages on the site, PWP naturally attracts links from other sites on a regular basis. PWP has become such an authority on poker that people are more than happy to link to particular pages on the site. Therefore this highlights how important quality content can be, as it not only keeps your visitors coming back for more, but it will help with your SEO efforts in the long run.
One thing that PWP does incredibly well is that it interlinks all of its pages. It’s hard to find any page on the site that does not have a link (or 5) to another page on the site. This allows Google to flow through the site thoroughly whilst it is being crawled, and allows each page to be given an equal importance in the eyes if Google. This is the reason why the homepage of the site is PR 5, yet many of the internal pages are as high as PR 4.
Summary
PlayWinningPoker is the perfect example of how good content and SEO triumphs over design when it comes to creating a successful poker site. Some people may say that the site is ugly, but this doesn’t stop Steve from making large amounts in revenue from the site every month. People visit websites for information, and if you can provide this to them, they are more than happy to overlook the design efforts for the most part.
PWP is a well-oiled machine when it comes to bringing in visitors from the search engines. Steve also owns a number of other poker websites, and on them he takes advantage of the same design style. So if it’s not broke, then why try and fix it?
One of the best aspects about Steve’s sites is that they are obviously geared to providing quality content first, and making money second. If you can make a website to be proud of, it’s likely that you will do well in the poker affiliate industry.