Rob Kerry from Ayima – Gambling / Gaming SEO

The gaming world is probably the most competitive niche in SEO – esp poker and casinos.

There is no secret sauce as there used to be e.g. with old link networks being burned.  Rob shows a graph of search volume and est clickthrough

888 vs William Hill – #1 and #4 respectively. Both are fairly similar in optimisation terms, but what separates them is their backlinks.  Rob uses a similar process to Dave Naylor to rank links according to anchor text, class C IPs and other metrics like PR.

Once you’ve dominated a market – eg casino in UK, what about branching out to other countries -eg France. Use backlink comparisons to check out a few of the top ranked sites in France. The main conclusion is that you should always use a subfolder and not a subdomain because with a subdomain you are starting from scratch.  You can register a subfolder to a different country within Google Webmaster Tools – so do that.  Rob expanded on this more in the Q&A – it is much easier, quicker and cheaper to use a subfolder on a generic TLD to rank for really competitive keyphrases in different countries, compared with building up authority from scratch on different (sub)domains.

My summary:

This was an excellent session as expected with such top class speakers, all so experienced that if you let them talk for any amount of time there’s going to be valuable stuff for anybody who is into Search Engine Optimisation to soak up. The major problem is that with the timescale the speakers are receiving, they have to cram a shedload of great ideas into a few bullet points. It’s so easy to get lost with all this information and for it to go in one ear and out the other! Needless to say I’ll be checking out the slides when they’re released and chatting to the speakers in the pub if possible!

I’m not sure what the next big conference will be about, hopefully they will have one dedicated solely to Web Design in the not too distant future.