PokerTips.org Case Study
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URL: www.PokerTips.org |
| PR: 4 | |
| Est: 2003 |
Overview
Before I started to create my own websites, I was an avid online poker player. Pokertips.org was one of the sites that I used to help develop my understanding of the game, so that I could increase my win rate at the tables. I’m sure that a lot of what I know now has come from the strategy articles made available on pokertips.org. I know for a fact that if it wasn’t for this site, I probably wouldn’t have such a strong understanding of pot odds as I do now.
But anyways, by all that I’m assuming that you can infer that pokertips.org is one of my favourite online poker portals. The site is simple, yet incredibly effective, and offers the average visitor everything they need to get started in the world of online poker. It is a solid benchmark for what a good poker portal should be.
Design
The general design of this site is pretty basic, and in all honesty it looks a little dated. However, this has no effect on the usability of the site, as everything is well structured and there are no problems with getting to any of the information on offer. This shows how a modern and fancy design is nowhere near as important as having a good navigation when it comes to creating your poker website.
I’ve mentioned this before on the site, but I’ll say it again… you can be sure that nobody is visiting your website for a fancy design. They are just looking for good content that has been well laid out, so get your navigation sorted and you will do just fine.
If you browse through the site you will not find one flashing banner. This helps to keep the site looking as clean as possible, and not distract the visitor with any interfering advertisements being thrown into their face. Banners are no where near as effective as text links, hence why pokertips.org has decided to omit them from the site completely.
Content
With a domain name like pokertips.org, you would expect the site to be orientated around providing poker tips and strategies; and you wouldn’t be wrong. The site’s main focus is around providing solid poker strategy and rules to help you to get to grips with the game.
The site offers nearly 70 strategy articles, as well as having a comprehensive guide to the rules of poker. By having lots of strategy content, the site is sure to be able to bring in numerous visitors from the search engines for keywords related to the poker strategy articles on offer.
To help keep the site updated regularly, poker news articles are posted on the site a few times a week. This helps search engines like Google to recognise that the site is regularly being updated and modified, so Google will spider the site more often, helping to get the new content indexed more quickly and ranking well in the search engines.
SEO
The first thing you may have noticed about pokertips.org is that the domain name extension is not .com, but a .org instead. The fact that the site ranks very highly for competitive search terms highlights how the TLD of you site will not have much of an effect (if any) on your search engine rankings.
Pokertips.org makes good use of subfolders throughout the site, using folders like /strategy/ to help organise different sections of the site, which will also help with SEO efforts. h1 tags are also used correctly, as they are used around the main headings for each of the pages.
Good keywords are also used in the titles of the pages, which helps Google and other search engines to identify what the page is about. However, having PokerTips.org at the start of each page titles is a little unnecessary, and the site as a whole would benefit from removing this from the titles and sticking with unique titles for each page.
Summary
Overall, PokerTips.org is essentially a basic site that provides everything you would be looking for as a visitor. The success of the site can be mainly attributed to the fact that it provides high quality, useful poker strategy as well as producing regular rolling poker news on the home page.
Whilst the site may not be the prettiest site around, it works with the basics of content and SEO to produce a clean and profitable site.