The best looking website, top search engine optimization and most unique poker room reviews won’t get you far if you don’t have fresh content. Exciting and routinely updated content is far and above the most important thing you can do to grow your website. Most new poker affiliates make the mistake of spending all their time on web design. Search engine results have absolutely nothing to do with the look of your website. Instead search results are driven by content that targets specific search keywords.

Less than 2% of bloggers and webmasters post new content daily. Think about that for a second. That means if you stick with a plan to add one new quality post per day you will be ahead of 98% of other people. That is a huge competitive advantage if you ask me. Having a great website without updated content is like owning a convertible without an engine - it looks really nice but won’t get you anywhere.

According to Pew Internet & American Life, a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds - amounting to 15,000 new blogs per day. Only a small percent of that figure will be poker content related. However, a significant portion will and you can’t possibly beat everyone in web design. The key in separating your site from the pack is exciting and insightful content.

As I just mentioned your poker posts and content must be of extremely high quality. Write something unique, insightful, educational and useful . People use search engines to get answers on whatever topic they want. Your goal is to not only provide the right answers, but to display on the first page of search results. Most people only look at the first page of search results, or only the first few actual results on the first page. Ranking in the first few results for poker related keywords and phrases should be your number one goal as a poker affiliate.

Your poker content must also be unique. Copying poker articles and posting them as your own is not only illegal, but will ultimately penalize your search engine rankings. Google and several other search engines have duplicate content penalties, which demotes sites with unoriginal content. This is to prevent someone from simply gathering thousands of RSS feeds and posting them on a website in order to get high search engine rank.

As the popular saying goes among webmasters, “content is king”.  This popular cliche has been used around the internet for good reason. Content is what brings you traffic through search and eventually links. Everythink revolves around quality and up to date content. Without it nobody will want to exchange links with you and search engines won’t respect you. Make it your goal to write one quality post per day and you will already be ahead of 98% of affiliates. Once you have thousands of posts and articles you can focus on aesthetics and other tinkering. Then you will be well on your way to making big money as an online poker affiliate.

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.