SEO expert Kelvin Newman from SiteVisibility believes that if gambling industry firms focused more on Google+ they could be among those the reap the rewards. Google’s own version of Facebook is still in its infancy and Newman explained that if SEO is your thing then “you’re better off spending time on Google+, where not a lot of people are and you can stand out more”. It solves the conundrum of why your boss has been on about you to get yourself G+ savvy and Newman added that “very quickly you can become one of the biggest gaming companies on Google+” and growth will be easier in that sense
I don’t have to tell you that SEO is about a lot more than social networks though and even if the business is moving in this direction the search itself will still be the daddy. With that in mind, Google release updates every so often that sends the world of the SEO peeps into overdrive. Two of these have been released over the last year with Newman explaining the “biggest impact has been Panda”.
Neman continued: “Panda is intended to penalize websites that have gotten too good at the production of content whereas Penguin targets aggressive link building tactics”.
“Updates are built around trying to reflect what users wants and having sites that people spend a good amount of time on.”
In the past gaming industry sites have been quick to use generic buzz words to bring users to the site and Google eventually got wise to this and the updates take this into account. In other words, SEO is now more about getting the right content into the correct hands and this is something that is “tricky” according to Newman.
“My two pieces of advice are to build a brand and produce great content,” Newman said. “You need to produce less and spend more time on it whilst at the same time consider alternative formats.”
Newman is very much a fan of using video as a way to boost your rankings thanks to its status as an “alternative” format. It’s “harder to produce” than a text based article, carries a lot more “value” and “instantly separates you” from sites that simply carry written content.
Being big on Facebook is ultimately what many brands want though and even if Google+ could be used as a useful tool, Facebook has more users and ultimately a larger customer base. To get more popular you will need to be coming up more often than the user’s ex-f*ck buddy in their search ranking and to do this Facebook has its own algorithm called EdgeRank.
“Three elements decide the rank. Affinity, time and weight,” Newman said. “First of all it’s do good stuff but think about affinity in the run up to an announcement, the timing of it and get as much weight by adding assets to the post.”
What’s clear is that Google+ isn’t as useless as you first thought it is and for Google in general, Newman put it well by stating that what they’re asking now “isn’t that different to a year ago”. Whether it will change that much over the next year is open to debate.
