Sportsbook Affiliate Community

It’s all about hoops in this week’s article of Sports Affiliate Weekly as we discuss on how to maximize your traffic during the NBA Playoffs. The NBA is the second biggest sport bet on in North American, a distant second behind NFL football betting. As the playoffs heat up so does the action at the sportsbooks as fans and gamblers look for the best odds to place their bets. In this article we will talk about how to prepare your site for the NBA playoffs and some great keywords to target.

When it comes to the playoffs it brings a whole new crowd to the sportsbooks increasing traffic and revenue. As an affiliate we have to convince these sometimes novice users about online sportsbooks. In all of my content articles I add a small part of informational advertisement. This day in age people tend to tune out the site wide banner, adding a small section of text promoting a special bonus, easy deposit method or other sportsbook promotions can be a way to increase conversions. After reading a few articles a visitor will have taken in enough advertisement to maybe check out the sporstbook you are trying to push.

What are people searching when trying to bet on the NBA Playoffs?

During the playoffs an increase in betting searches is always seen in Google trends. These keywords include;

Betting odds, point spread, betting lines, betting tips and picks. All of these keywords have a fair amount of competition but open for affiliates to rank high in. The Playoffs give us additional keywords to target that can get a good number of searches with little competition. A great way to steal some easy traffic is by targeting Series. For example targeting “Western Conference Finals odds” a long keyword like this is easy to rank high in and can also produce a good volume of traffic.

This year’s playoffs should be very exciting and full of storylines. Round one playoff matches are as follow;

Eastern conference

Chicago Bulls vs. Indiana Pacers
Miami Heat vs Philadelphia 76ers
Boston Celtics vs New York Knicks
Orlando Magic vs Atlanta Hawks

Western Conference

San Antonio Spurs vs Memphis Grizzlies
Los Angeles Lakers vs New Orleans Hornets
Oklahoma City Thunder vs Denver Nuggets
Dallas Mavericks vs Portland Blazers

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Most SEOs will agree that if a body is thinking about launching an online sports betting (or any other) operation from scratch, the whole thing should start from the analyzing the niche, estimating search volumes for certain potentially targetable keywords, estimating potential revenues and analyzing the level of competition in the given niche. All that is followed by picking of the URL. This has been a fairly straightforward issue so far: if one was aiming for the keyword “sportsbook” for instance, then sportsbook.com was the ideal and perfect URL. Of course, in none of the competitive niches (like online casinos, online poker, poker rakeback etc.) are these perfect URLs available, so what people do is they find the next best thing. They first explore the .org and .net domain extensions then all the other available ones. Apparently, as far as search engines are concerned, different extensions make little difference. In competitive niches, finding perfect URLs with any kind of extension is quite impossible though. What folks usually find themselves left with is hyphenated URL-variations, which contain their main keyword and something else too. For sportsbook, a good example would be california-sportsbook.com or anything else that reflects location or whatever the creators of the future website deem relevant.

Now then, the boost that perfect URL gives websites in the SERPS is obvious. A site with a perfect URL but a poor backlink profile will likely outrank a site with a less than perfect URL and slightly better link profile. Still, it is possible to beat out perfect URL sites, as long as they do not have a more or less skilled SEO team backing them up. At that point though, overtaking them in the SERPS becomes quite impossible.

Rumors have surfaced a while ago about search engines moving to break this death –grip that perfect URL sites hold on the top of the pops by downgrading the boost they get for their URLs. Various “experts” were quick to jump on the news morsels and began trumpeting that hyphenated URLs and ones containing the words “best” together with the keyword they aim for would be penalized.

Now, let’s get this straight: what sense would it make to penalize such URLs? Surely, there are websites out there which abuse the system in various ways and which do indeed have hyphenated URLs, however, the vast majority of websites out there which use such URLs are perfectly legit operations. While downgrading the URL boost for perfect URLs would make sense indeed, “penalizing” hyphenated URLs wouldn’t make any whatsoever. After all, the aim of a move like this would be to even the playing field and to allow “brand” sites to rise to the top if they so deserve. “Penalizing” a website for its URL in any way would be a huge mistake. Websites should solely be judged based on their contents and not on some collection of characters which represent the operation on the World Wide Web, and which often end up en-masse in the hands of shady speculators. What the future brings though, remains to be seen. Search engines have no allegiance and lately they have been favoring speculators, so everything is in the books at this stage.

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Those better versed in the obscure art of SEO surely know what a site-wide link is. For those of you who aren’t all that familiar with the lingo: a site-wide link is one that appears on every page of a website, usually in a section (like a left or right menu which runs the entire site. The significance of such site-wide links has been subject to much controversy over the years, mostly due to its extremely volatile nature. A few years ago (around 2006), landing a much too large site-wide link (on a website with more than 1,000 pages) was considered a deadly sin for every self-respecting SEO. Some said that search engines penalized such links, others – and these guys were probably more sensible about the whole thing – were of the opinion that search engines probably counted such site-wide links as one – off the homepage of the site. A more elaborate approach preached that a site-wider off a 100-400 page site did not hurt, but something off a 20k+ page site definitely did.

For a while there, search engines didn’t seem to count site-widers as more than one link – I can tell you that from my own experience. Those days are gone though, and nowadays it seems like site-widers are not only not penalized, they’re quite beneficial. Again, a sudden hit off a site with 100k pages may in fact hurt your site, but this theory is indeed just that: a theoretical assumption.

The most interesting thing about site-wide links lately has been one concerning the relevancy of the websites on which they’re posted. Not so long ago, getting links off websites that were “related” to yours carried considerably more weight than links off some random site. For instance, if you had a sports betting site or a poker rakeback site, you were best off getting links off other sports betting sites and poker sites like poker forums or fan-sites. Nowadays, your competitors will trample all over you getting site-wide links off generic blogs, travel/fashion/whatever websites, buying them up en-masse. Apparently, indiscriminate link-buying is the way to go these days. The question is: is this a viable long-term strategy though? Had you asked me that a couple of years ago, I would’ve said no way. Today, I can’t tell you that anymore. As a matter of fact, judging by the direction in which things have moved over the last 2-3 years, right now I’d have to tell you, yes, it is. There’s only one obstacle I see in the way of link spamming currently: the quagmire that will develop when everyone starts using it.

Now, I’m not a prophet and therefore I can’t tell you with any sort of accuracy where web search will evolve in the future, so I can’t recommend that you start link buying and link spamming. Right now, it looks awful tempting though and it may in fact be the way forward for some time to come…

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