As the world of online casinos has boomed, so has the amount of collateral that supports them. Across the Internet, a whole host of online casino review sites have risen to prominence, and their mission is simple—to help you sift through the noise so that you can see what some of the most established and well-known casino partners are really like.
With the casino online review site industry being exceptionally competitive, the need for high-class search engine optimization (SEO) practices has never been higher. SEO, at its heart, is incredibly simple. The better the SEO, the higher the website will appear on search engines like Google.
With those browsing search engines often having a notoriously short attention span, if you want a casino review site seen, your SEO has to be spot on. There are many different ways that both new and established casino websites can implement and enhance their SEO practices. Based on my many years of experience, I will explain some of these best practices below.
Why is SEO Important?
When trying to attract visitors to any sort of casino review site, traffic can be driven in two ways, paid and organic. Paid does what it says on the tin and is where you will pay for adverts in the hope that the adverts are seen, helping increase the number of visitors to your site.
While every major company does some form of paid advertising, the golden goose of driving traffic is through the organic route. Organic traffic is when people find a website by their own means, and a likely source of organic traffic are search engines. With sites trying to drive as much organic traffic as possible, SEO is fundamental in trying to position a website as high up the search engine rankings as possible.
Efficient SEO could help propel better levels of organic traffic, which in turn, could save on costs that could be spent elsewhere.
Keywords are Crucial
The core of having strong SEO principles is ensuring you have the perfect blend of keywords. Keywords are focused on words and terms that people are often likely to search for, and they need to be related to the area of content that a website specializes in.
In the case of a casino review website, there will be many different things that people will search for. Terms such as roulette, blackjack, slots, casino, welcome bonus, and deposit methods are all examples of keywords that would perform well for casino review websites.
The idea is to stuff these words and phrases naturally into text so that the content people are reviewing makes sense but also ticks all the boxes when it comes to ensuring that the content is being picked up by search engines.
The Focus Shouldn’t Just be on Single Words
One of the traps that people fall into when trying to implement better SEO is picking words and terms that the majority of casino review sites would choose. By using competitive words, you may find that the impacts of SEO are limited, and the overall page rankings remain the same.
However, one tip that can change that is trying to work in word tails that are around four words long. The idea is that these words would replicate the search terms that people may enter into a search engine. For example, “The best sites to play blackjack” or “Where to play roulette”. This expansion on SEO keywords can help boost the rankings of a page significantly.
How To Help Find Keywords
As you have probably gathered, SEO isn’t something you can really do on the fly, it requires a strategy where the keywords across the pages are as comprehensive as possible.
When trying to find out what keywords can be effective, there are tools that can help. Specialist SEO agencies can create pages for you that should help tick all the keyword metrics, but using an agency obviously comes with a price.
There is a plethora of keyword tool websites that allow you to put in the general topic of your pages and, in turn, they produce a list of all the associated keywords that should help drive traffic. Often, the scope of these websites can be limited, or a small fee may be charged. However, if you are starting from scratch, these keyword sites are a great place to start.
Review Keywords Regularly
When trying to ensure that you have the most effective keywords on your site, you will need to be mindful that the most popular keywords can often change. What was previously considered a popular keyword may not continue to be.
To ensure your SEO approach is as fresh as possible, keep checking to see that the keywords you have mentioned on your pages are still relevant as, over time, you may need to update them.
The Importance of Meta Tagging
Meta tagging is a huge part of an effective SEO strategy. There are usually two parts of meta tagging—the meta title and meta description. The meta title and meta description are how the website will be displayed on search engines, and are often the first bit of code that the search engines will rank.
With meta tagging being so pivotal, it is really important that some of the most important keywords have a presence within both the meta title and meta description.
Within both the meta title and meta description, there are often character limits that need to be adhered to. If either the title or description is too long, the keywords won’t fire. They must be worked in a natural way so that if a person stumbles across the page on a search engine, the content of the page is clearly understood.
There should be meta details on every page of a site to ensure that every part of a website is as SEO compliant as possible. Each of these titles should be unique so that they can easily be picked up by the search engines.
Use of Headings
When working on popular word processing programs, you may have stumbled across different title tags, which are often called tags, and they will have the labels H1, H2, H3, etc. Just like any form of content, the use of headings is important to break up text, but they can also serve as another way of working in key SEO keywords.
While the headings themselves don’t contribute towards an SEO ranking, the words within them will, and it’s common that the most popular keywords are worked into them. The main title tags are usually used with H1 tags, with the other subheadings usually ranking from H2–H4 tags. Most websites that contain different headers will all be comprised of H-tagged headers, and they are imperative to use if you want to improve and boost your SEO profiling.
Ensure the Site Structure is Sound
When trying to implement effective SEO strategies, often too much of a focus is on the keywords, and the fundamentals of having a strong page structure can be overlooked.
For the search engine bots to discover the keywords, the journey of the website needs to be fluid and make sense. Every page should have a meaning and follow a natural path. If there are too many pages, the SEO networks won’t be able to push through; if there are too few, the necessary density of keywords isn’t likely to pull through.
There are specialists you can consult to ensure that the user experience is optimal. However, if you don’t have the budget or don’t want to pay for somebody to look at a user experience journey, just double-check before you fill in your content to ensure that the journey flows and people won’t get lost within your pages.
Track Your Progress
The joy of SEO is that it can be easily tracked through your analytics. By checking how much traffic your site is achieving, you should hopefully see an increase in visitors that should arise from good SEO principles being applied.
On pages that have performed above expectation, this could be down to the keywords that you have implemented. If the visitors to popular pages tail off, it might be time to renew and relook at what words you have implemented. Similarly, if you have pages on your site that haven’t seen much traffic, a new SEO approach may need to be applied. You should be able to track your page’s statistics on a daily basis so your SEO strategy can be constantly monitored and improved.
Davor Štefanović has over 10 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing and he holds the Poynter ACES Introductory Certificate in Editing & Fact-checking Fundamentals and he also has a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature from the University of Novi Sad. He ensures all content is of the highest standard, factually accurate, and engaging.
