Improving Search Engine Performance

In my last two blog posts I went over the importance of meta tags and original content. There are several other simple items a webmaster can do to do improve their performance in the search engines. These actions will take you just an hour or so a week.One of the things that go into your score at search engines is the age of your site. If you are a new site there is nothing you can do at first to help your score here. There is something you can do to help though with another part of this score. Search engines also often look at how long your website’s domain is registered into the future. Considering your domain is less than $10 a year in most cases make sure your domain does not expire in the next 5 years. The consensus is that Google respects a site that appears to be in it for the long term over a site that has yet to renew its domain name. A site with only a few months left in its registration isn’t going to get much respect at all. This is on top of not wanting your domain to expire because you forgot to renew it.Another item is having an up to date website. Not only is quality original content important but keeping it fresh is as well. Go through your site often to make sure your content doesn’t mention a promotion from 6 months ago. Also check the promotions pages of the poker rooms you offer often to look for ever changing offers and promos. When the Googlebot visits your site he will be happy to review your site again instead of leaving immediately. The Googlebot knows if your site has been updated or not and if your site appears stale he will leave and if it continues to stay stale it will hurt your overall performance and could lower the number of future visits from him.Another important item is links. This does not mean go out and get a link to your site on every link exchange page or pay for those link services. In this day and age those don’t work. What you need are link backs from quality sites. These will come naturally over time if your content is of high quality but you can do a few things to try and speed it up. Although not as important as they used to be blogs are a great starting point. Take some time at least once a week to write about your poker life. Talk about that great bonus you cleared, how you just moved up in limits or how rakeback helped you break even this month. Link a keyword in your blog to your site every now and then. Not every time and no more than once every three paragraphs as nobody likes a spam blog. Over time you will get readers, back links and hopefully some visits from the Googlebot.In my next blog post I will write about other ways to get links.