When you’re learning how to make a casino website, you’re going to hear a lot about backlinks.
Backlinks are links on other websites that link back to your site. In Google’s eyes, they serve as a measure of your site’s popularity. If you have more backlinks, Google presumes, your site must be more popular. The more popular your site, the higher ranking you’ll receive in the search engines. And the better your search engine results, the better your affiliate commissions.
Without backlinks, it becomes very hard to get traffic to your site. However, when you’re learning the details on how to make a casino website and first learning about backlinks, it’s likely that you’ll hear a lot of bad advice. One of those common pieces of advice is that quantity matters over quality. In fact, that’s just not true. Google is on a quest to improve the quality of their results, and is looking at the quality of backlinks just as hard as they look at the quality of your website content.
These five tips will help you obtain high-quality backlinks that will lead to high-quality traffic. And that, in turn, will lead to better results and better commissions.
1) Watch out where you get your backlinks
In short, look at your backlinks as you do your content. Quality matters. You wouldn’t post sloppy, careless content on your site, would you? Then why would you want a backlink from a sloppy, careless site? Make sure you trust the source of your backlinks and focus your efforts on obtaining links from sites with good navigation, great design and quality content.
The best sites to receive backlinks from are authority sites, those sites that are highly relevant to your site and that have a high Google PageRank. While many authority sites are government (.gov) and university (.edu) websites, a number of .com websites, such as CNN.com, CNET.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and CasinoAffiliatePrograms.com all have high PageRank. While it’s unlikely you’ll be able to add your link to the navigation of many of these sites, you can get backlinks through blog commenting and, in some cases, by adding a link to your forum signature.
2) Focus on getting backlinks from relevant sites
In addition to quality, relevance matters. Make sure the site you’re getting a backlink from is relevant to your business. If you’re requesting a link from a cosmetics review site to your affiliate poker site, it’s likely that Google won’t find a lot of relevance between the two sites. In addition, it’s also likely the traffic you’ll get will be poor, which will give you a higher bounce rate and shorter user sessions.
One of the best ways to make sure a site is relevant to your niche and keyword strategy is to create a Google Alert for your keywords. This helps ensure that you’re looking for links on the sites that Google has associated with your target keyword.
3) Remember to grow your backlinks at a “natural” speed
Remember the aphorism “slow and steady wins the race”? That saying can definitely be applied to the pace at which you should grow your backlinks!
It’s simply not “natural” in Google’s eyes to go from 0 to 1,000 backlinks in a matter of days. If this is the pace at which you grow your links, Google is likely to take notice at that dramatic increase. And that could mean your site will be penalized.
On the other hand, the more natural, and measured, your pace of growing your links, the more likely Google will reward the growth in your links as natural and organic.
4) Diversity matters
Another component to recognize is that your links should come from a variety of websites around the world.
In addition to the authority sites mentioned above, you can get links from unmonetized content sites, blogs, forums, Flickr pages and YouTube. In some cases, you might also want to get links from Facebook and Twitter, which Google has begun to index and rank in the same way it ranks other sites.
5) Make sure your casino website is great before requesting a backlink
You wouldn’t want people dropping by when your house is a mess, would you? It’s the same for your site. Make sure every thing is as tidy and clean as possible when people visit. That will help you make a better first impression, particularly to people you might be asking for links.
Here is a quick list of things to check to make sure your online house is in order:
- Do you have any broken links?
- Are all of your images working correctly?
- Is the site user-friendly and easy to navigate?
- Does it look great? Are the images attractive and is the text properly formatted?
- Do you have high-quality content that adds value in your niche?
Finally, the last thing to note is that the best backlinks are one-way. Why? Those links tell Google that the site recommending your content is doing so without any expectations. It shows that the site’s owner genuinely trusts and enjoys your content. To get these kinds of links, you’ll want to see what kind of service you can provide to other websites. Perhaps you could allow them to publish your free report or write a guest blog post for them.
As you’re going out into the world and making new connections, you’ll make a lot of progress if you follow these tips.
Are you having trouble, or success, in using backlinks as you make your casino website? Do you have suggestions for how to make a casino website a backlink success? Share your comments below and let us know!