As you might already know, the top ten results in search engines get nearly all of the traffic. Going one step further the top six places get most of the traffic. Web surfers rarely go past the first page search results. They usually don’t need to because the first page usually has the answers they are looking for. Secondly, most people are lazy or simply don’t look at the tabs on the bottom leading to a second or third page. This makes ranking on the first page absolutely necessary if you want large amounts of traffic. So why do you need to rank in the top six places? Well if you understand page breaks and scrolling you will see that the top six search results are usually above the page break. Meaning search engine users have a tendency not to use the scroll bar to view the bottom results of the first page of search.

Search engine optimization describes the process you must go through as a poker website affiliate to make your site rank high in search engines. One of the main components of search engine rankings is known as backlinks. These links are brought about when someone puts your link on their site. Everytime someone does this your site gets a vote of confidence. Search engines recognize backlinks or link exchanges as tiny endorsements. When a site has a lot of backlinks, search engines believe that website is worthy of high search rankings.  Search engine algorythms calculate the relevency of your site based on keywords and backlinks.

So now that we have established the importance of backlinks lets go a step further. Backlinks as described above are tiny endorsements given by other sites. So getting a lot of back links is all you need to do right? This couldn’t be any further from the truth. Who endorses your website with a backlink is more important than how many people have your link on their site. Lets use an easy to understand scenario to help you understand.

Imagine you design a hot new golf shoe and want to promote it. Would you rather have one hundred unknown golfers promoting your shoe or one famous athlete like Tiger Woods wearing your golf shoe? The answer is obvious in Tiger Woods giving your shoe an endorsement. Backlinks work much the same way. The quality of the backlink is several times more important than the quantity. The quality of a website is measured and scored in what is called "pagerank".

Another major factor in ranking high for keywords is the title of the backlinks you receive. Say for example your poker website address is 101pokerlist.com. When setting up a link exchange you want the title of your link to be the keyword  phrase you want to rank high for. This is also called "anchor" text or titles. Instead of this website using PokerAffiliateship.com it uses Poker Affiliate Programs as its anchor text. This way the site will hopefully receive a higher ranking for the search term "poker affiliate programs" in the future.

So how exactly can you secure quality backlinks? The best part about link exchanges is they are completely free. However, getting people to agree to an exchange can be difficult at times. Most people only want to exchange links with websites having high pagerank.  The trouble with this is google and other search engines update and tweek pagerank algorythms all the time, so rankings are constantly changing. Secondly, new sites often start out with a very low pagerank since they have little content and backlinks. Although these sites start off small, they can grow into some of the best websites on the internet. Be sure to actually check out the websites you plan on doing a link exchange with. If the websites have killer designs and fresh exciting content, consider exchanging links immediately. That is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

• Blog Comments
• Message Boards
• Article Databases

To get you started, free and easy places exist to gain quality backlinks. First off, read blogs and websites and leave comments on those sites with your link at the end of the comment. Be careful to actually post quality comments so you don’t get marked as spam. Another method is posting in forums and message boards with your poker website link in the signature block. Lastly, you can submit articles to ezine and other article databases with your link inside the article. Don’t forget to include the proper anchor text in all your links!  Try to get a few link exchanges per week if you can - it will certainly add up over time and so will your search engine hits.

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hard to compete against the big guys
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study what areticles are popular and what keywords are used . Nail those ones.

Building and growing your poker affiliate website traffic should be your primary goal. Since more traffic usually leads to higher player conversion volume, it would be in your best interests to get as many visitors to your poker affiliate website as possible. Many different methods exist for growing website traffic, each having unique assets and liabilities. A few bad ways of receiving traffic also exist that you should definitely consider staying away from. A few commonly accepted ways of attracting readership and visitors to your website will be presented in this article. However, you should keep in mind that not every method listed will best suit your needs. Trial and error and experimentation will definitely be needed to identify which methods work best for you.

Arbitrage
Buying traffic at a low price only to direct it to a website with advertisements where clicks or commissions are higher is known as arbitrage. This is especially popular with Google Adwords where users buy traffic at a low cost-per-click and sell it at higher CPCs one or more times. Theoretically you could buy one thousand dollars worth of paid traffic and turn a profit - providing the traffic you bought earns you more than one thousand dollars. Experimenting with this can be interesting, but rarely successful. If you do manage to arbitrage successfully you can make a ton of money!

Adspace
Again, paid advertising only works if you are able to make a positive return on your investment. You need to recoup the costs of advertising space at some point. Purchasing adspace can even operate on a break even basis since you are building your website brand. Furthermore, if the players you convert are signed up for revenue sharing you make money for the lifetime of the player. This can make paid advertising profitability difficult to measure.

Email Campaigns
Sending out a newsletter is a great way to build traffic. Newsletters are usually forwarded to family and friends of the receiptient, encouraging more people to visit your website. This can also build a sense of trust and loyalty to your website. Remember that spam is no longer tolerated under United States law - so stay away from unsolicited emailing.

Search Engine Traffic
Unless your poker affiliate domain name is a major keyword, search engines will account for 99% of your traffic. Creating unique and exciting content is the best way to get listed in search engines. Valuable information attracts readers to your website though various keyword searches. Best of all, writing articles is virtually free other than the time you spend creating them. If your website had one thousand articles and each article averaged one view per day you would be looking at the possibility of 1,000 visitors per day. Your number one goal as an affiliate should be keeping fresh content flowing to your site on a daily basis.

Partner Links
Backlinks are a great way to get your poker affiliate content ranked highly by search engines. You obviously want to show up at the top of the first page for poker affiliate keywords. Backlinks not only provide traffic, but will earn your website the respect of search engines. Partner links build trust and increase your websites page rank - a measure of popularity by search engine software.

Forums & Message Boards
Content is the number one determining factor in growing website traffic. Forums and message boards are places where users actually create content for you. They also bring repeat visitors and a sense of community for your viewers. Companies like Vbulletin have produced search engine optimized forums for websites. Threads and posts in these forums are often indexed in major search engines.

Awstats
Like Webalizer and Google Analytics a program called Awstats is a great way to review your traffic details. You should set specific goals for the volume of viewers you receive on a monthly basis. Awstats gives you a pretty good idea of where your visitors are coming from - particularly what keywords users are typing in search engines to get to your site. It also tells you what articles were clicked on in search results. If you find a certain article topic is getting a lot of traffic it would be wise to keep targeting that topic. This is commonly known as “keyword targeting”.

Hopefully you better understand the complexity involved with growing your website traffic. Fresh content provided daily is the best and cheapest way to grow your website traffic. It is completely free and will last as long as your website exists. Building a huge content base make take years to do, but will pay for itself several times over. Commit yourself to create at least one new article or post per day. Over the course of several years it will certainly add up, and so will your profits as a poker affiliate.