Goal: top 5 for 'rakeback' - best approach?

Sort of a general question, but I see a top 5 ranking for the term rakeback as being key to my affiliate business' success.

My site is still unranked and unindexed.

What I've been doing:

-Making relevent links exchanges, one at at a time, with any site who will do it, on pages where the words poker or rakeback appears.

-visiting well-ranked sites (KW=rakeback or "gambling links") and submitting my links to to all who have link swapping programs, and keeping my fingers crossed.

-Researching, by doing link:www.domainhere.com searches and making notes on the link structures of pages who's rank I want, investigating their linkers for possible links exchanges, pricing ad space I can't afford yet, etc.
-putting keywords in my description tags and actual HTML file names (offers.html is now rakeback_offers.html)

-emphasizing 'rakeback' and de-emphasizing 'poker', as competition for good results for poker is too stiff, and anyone searching for rakeback is a poker player anyway.

-interlinking all my pages

Now, what SHOULD I be doing that I'm not already? How exactly do I determine who I should get links from, where I should buy space, etc. ...Reaching customers is a goal, but from strictly an SEO perspective,what criteria do I look for when deciding who I should ask/pay to link me? Any advice would be appreciated. I'm determined to make this happen one way or the other. I have confidence in the marketing/message strength, but not so much in my ability to use the technology to make it visible, distribute it effectively (and affordably). Thanks in advance,

Chris

You could try joining the DigitalPoint Co-op (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/) which is an advertising network. Depending on the strength and size of your site, it will be given a certain amount of 'weight'. Create one add only with the anchor text 'rakeback'. It helps SERP's to some extent, but because the ads are rotated, it would not be as good as the equivilent number of static links.

You have to add DigitalPoint code to your own site as well so that other sites' ads will be rotated on your pages.

An alternative is link-vault.com, which is also an advertising network, but it uses static rather than rotating links. You will also have to put Link Vault ads on your own site.

DigitalPoint don't allow you to use its service alongside Link Vault; I presume Link Vault have similar terms. (Note: Type in the address of these sites directly in your browser. Don't use a link on anyone's forum signature to go to these sites. They will get a percentage of your weight forever as a commission if you do.)

One drawback with these services is that you don't have control over the type of sites your ad appears on. They are likely to be completely unrelated to the theme of your site.

I use DigitalPoint and am happy with it, I have not tried Link Vault so I can't comment on it.

Another option that you could choose is to sign up with one of the press release agencies and issue a press release with 'rakeback' anchor text included. PRWeb.com offer this on their releases if you pay $200 or higher.

Another service, PR.com allow you to sign up for free. You have to fill out a company profile first, which they publish. Then you can issue your press release. On the free programme, each anchor texted phrase is about $25. They also have more costly paid programmes with options for more anchor texted links included. They reserve the right to start charging customers who have signed up for the free programme in the future. They gain by being able to add your company profile to their directory. If you leave, they will delete your profile and any press releases.

The general advantage with press release services is that they generally get replicated across a number of different sites, so you will in reality get more than one backlink for your money.

The downside is that links on press releases may be downgraded in importance by Google at some point in the future.

i'm doing some work on my site at the moment and will be issuing a release when it's finished. It will be interesting to see what impact it will have.

I forgot to mention a couple of things:

On another thread today it was suggested that link buying / exchanging be done with sites that are viewed by the same demographic as your target audience. So, for example, in addition to actual gambling sites that mention poker/rakeback, you could also target sites that provide tourist information on gambling locations like Las Vegas, Atlantic City.

You are concerned about the technical aspects of link building. From reading your post I think you do not have anything to worry about. You obviously know about many of the optimization techniques. In my experience to date, the majoraty of link building work is non-technical, such as the research you are already carrying out.



You don't say how old it is - if it is very new, don't worry, it will be indexed, especially if you have already spent time working on link building.

One thing you could do is run the site through a spider simulator. These replicate how a Search Engine views a page. You should do this just to make sure there are no major errors that might prevent SE spiders reading the page properly. (An example of this might be an unclosed <img> tag.) A good spider simulator is at www.seo-kit.com.

And finally...you say your site is an affiliate business, I assume you mean that you are signed up as an affiliate of numerous online gambling services. While waiting for the site to rank well, you could experiment with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising for a while, such as Google AdWords. Run some ads for a few days and see if their cost is outweighed by the income from affiliates. If it is, keep it going. If not, it's easy to cancel your ads.

I'm not into gambling myself, so one question - is rakeback a sufficiently popular term to drive traffic to your site? One thing you could do is run a check on wordtracker.com to see how popular it is, and look for related popular terms.

I just did a check the term "rakeback" only gets 2 clicks per day on wordtracker and only 28 clicks per day on overture. check for yourself at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ . So I don't really think this will be the key to your success.

I agree with the above.

Even "party poker" or "poker Room" would be better to go after. But then again, you're competing the the acutal sites. YOu need to go after words other than the companies that promote poker.

Scott Fish

Thanks to everyone for replying... I looked at Link Vault and makemegoogle, etc, but didn't like the lack of control over what links I'd be displaying, whether they screen out blacklisted/banned sites, etc.

Webmasters who I've spoken to (rather than just their link swapping form letters) have said they like my site, and I got a PR5 and a couple of 4s to link to me today... it's my best link so far I think, so I'm pleased. And I'm dumping the banners - gamblinglinks.net won't return my emails and I don't see any evidence that Im linked anywhere.

I might have to rethink 'rakeback' as my only targetted keyword - I didnt even know about wordtracker, so thanks for that, too.

Rakeback is a very colloquial thing that only a small percentage of online players are even aware of, and I'm trying to change that. On the upside, when you do get a big player who's keyed into rakeback and expects it of an affiliate, it's worth several hundred dollars a month, for about 5 mins of admin.

I'll keep at it. I"m currently trying to negotiate link swaps by contacting well ranked sites' webmasters, whos products/services compliment mine and offering them banner space, etc.

Thanks again,

Chris

Full Tilt Poker is a much, MUCH more popular search term so I've switched my description/title keywords around a bit. Words listed first are better?

Does anyone know how many occurrences of this keyword term I should have on each page, and how does the googlebot tell if they're all in context or not?

One other thing: is having keywords of "full tilt poker" and "full tilt" considered irrelevent?

C

I presume you mean having these terms in your <meta name = "keywords" content="*****"> in the header. It's fair to say that SE's take very little notice of what's in the keywords nowadays. But it's still good practice to put each phrase in the keywords ONCE. So you could have <meta name = "keywords" content="full tilt, poker.">

How Google finds if keywords are in context is pretty complex. I'd suggest that you run a search here to find posts referring to 'Google Patent', if you want to find out more about the technicalities. In layman's terms, if it reads normally, then it's OK, if it looks like keyword stuffing, then it is keyword stuffing.