Casino Marketing

Where does it all begin? Where do you start? How do you brand something on the Internet that never existed before today? How do you market a casino?
Don’t know where to begin when it comes to a marketing campaign?

There’s a lot to cover. We’ll give you a few pointers, but that’s as far as we can go. Our own competitors come here too, to read what we have to say. They hope to find out how we do it. We’ll never tell. We didn’t spend years studying this industry to give it all away, but we will explain the basics to aid you in understanding just how the world of Internet marketing really works.

To Begin We Will Discuss The Search Engine

Search Engine Spider? What’s that? Many know the answer, but if you’re new to the industry we’ll explain. Ask yourself this …. What does a spider crawl? A web. That’s what the search engines do. They send out their own spiders, which crawl the web. These spiders crawl through websites, starting with one and following links from that first one to the next one, and so on. Some refer to them as robots. We like the spider term, since this is the web.

Originally, the spider would enter a page and record information found in the website “meta tags” which tell the spider what to bring back to the search engine. These “tags” in the page carry various forms of information, but 3 main items were sought out by spiders. These 3 items were the “Title” tag, the “Description” tag, and the “Keywords” tag. Each tag is self-explanatory. The “Title” holds the title of the page, which is what you see in the top left corner of your web browser right now. It also tells the search engine what to display as the “title” of your link in the search results. The “Description” tag describes a summary of what the page is about. That’s the little “description” you see on the search engine results page. Finally, the “Keywords” tag. This tag tells the search engine when to show your link. For example, if you had the word “blackjack” in your keywords tag you are telling the spider to tell the search engine to display your link when someone searches for blackjack.

Now, as we stated in the beginning of the above paragraph, that was “originally” how things were done. Over time people once again outsmarted the machine. They started copying the highest ranking website’s keywords tag information and placing it in their own keywords tag, thus adding more competition to that high ranking website since the search engine now ranked them higher. Another problem was keyword abuse. Some people would type the same keyword over and over in the tag, making the spider think their page was more important since it mentioned the word so much. The spider wasn’t smart enough to catch that, at first. Later search engines changed. They made their spiders smarter. In summary, most don’t even read the keywords tag anymore.

So Now What?

How do you establish search engine rank without keywords to direct the search engine to your listing? Content. That’s how. Search engines still use keywords, just in a different way. Spiders still index your website page for keywords. The only difference is they get them somewhere else. Now the search engines crawl the content. For example, visit Google and search for a word or a phrase. You’ll see the word or phrase highlighted in the search results. Now you know what Google’s spider looks for. Where you see highlighted words is where the spider crawls and records information. In this case it’s the web pagetag and the text on the page. Google puts both of these together to form it’s keyword database. Why so much about Google? Because Google, as of May 2002, is to provide AOL, Compuserve, and the rest of the AOL related search engines with their search results. Google is a good example of indexed text keyword search results.

Each search engine is different though, so the website needs to be targeted at each specific search engine you want to gain rank on, and there are hundreds of search engines today, so there’s a lot of work to be done. MSN, for example, puts it’s keyword database together not from the Title tag and the page text, but from the Title tag and the Description tag. The domain name (URL) itself also plays a part in relevancy.

So, what we’re saying is make a lot of text full of keywords, make a title full of keywords, and make a description full of keywords with a keyword related domain name and we’ll rank high? Nope, not quite. It’s not that simple. There is a lot involved in making rank. It is a lot of work and requires a lot of time. Don’t try and learn it all right here, because we would need about 20 more pages this size to explain it all to you. That would only cover the major search engines. We haven’t even touched base on major indexes and directories, or reciprocal link sites, cloaking, and doorway pages, which are now nothing more than a myth when it comes to rank. These are pages on the internet generated to show link popularity, but that’s becoming a penalty with many engines today so don’t waste your time there. Another fantastic service that’s beginning to fade away, since it can now cause your website to lose rank, are websites generated just to make link popularity. These sites were great in 2001, and all through 2002, but it’s changing again, as usual. Here we would visit a website that let you add yourself to a link list, with a related category. Next we would upload pages to our own websites linking to everybody else that signed up in our category. That made the spider think our site was more popular since more sites linked to us, but today that’s changing fast. The spiders are getting a new brain again. Now, they know if these websites are “popularity generators” so they penalize you for being listed on them. For now though, it’s a good practice to continue. As the year moves on you may want to pull that listing out of there as more spiders upgrade to their new thinking process.

Keep in mind, everything changes every month. We, for example, continually edit and update our process all over the web, keeping our clients where they need to be. At the same time, we continually monitor the search engines. Constantly watching for changes in rhythm to keep ahead. Frustrating, but worth it.

SEARCH ENGINES ARE ONLY THE STARTING POINT

Search engines require a lot of work, as we previously explained. Think maybe you’ll just sit back and submit submit submit unitil you’ve covered the top 1000 engines? Guess what? The majority of engines, after 30 days, drop your listing unless you submit it again. Some accept your submitted site, but don’t add you unless you pay a fee. That’s what companies like us are here for. To submit your website, to optimize your pages, to unleash our secrets and skyrocket your page rank. And that we will.

There’s a lot more to search engines, but hopefully you understand them a little better now that we’ve explained a few of their minor features. Every single one is different, completely different. Additionally, every single one seems to change on a regular basis. Once you figure them out, they switch to keep ahead of you.

THE FFA LINK POPULARITY MYTH

FFA, otherwise known as Free For All links pages, allow you to add your website to their long list of links, for free. Why? so search engines crawling the pages find you and index your pages. Good idea? Sure, back in 1999 it was. Worked well actually until around late 2000. That’s when you could go to your friendly neighborhood FFA page and type your link in for instant addition, and for good. Today, try that out. Submit your page to an FFA site if you really believe they are important. Go back in a few hours and look at that same page you submitted your link to. Utto, it’s not there? Why’s this? Because you were already bumped by a thousand others doing the same thing. Once a certain amount of links are on the page, the website drops those on the bottom off, but you still get a million junk emails either way. FFA sites are well known for the junk mail. Once you place your site in an FFA you’re also agreeing to receive “all you can read” for the next 12 months or so. That’s probably where a lot of those “opt-in” email lists you see for sale come from. You’ve just opted in by linking in.

So what now? Well, you are welcome to do as you wish should you decide to handle your own marketing strategy, but we do know that our services are at the top. We’ve disclosed about 10% of what we do in terms of marketing campaigns. The other 90% is what keeps us separate from everybody else. Unfortunately, we can’t share what that other 90% is since it is the key to our company success, but we’ll give you a couple interesting examples below.

This is how we begin to create the target marketplace. Target marketing is what brings the traffic to your website. For example, did you know that …..

82% of of online casino visitors visit land casinos
61% of casino & sports gamblers play golf
82% drink alcohol, with 77% of that being beer
73% read newspapers, 75% own cell phones
Half bank online one-quarter trade stocks online
56% are married, while 44% are not
34% enjoy fashion and clothing
51% smoke cigarettes – 8% smoke cigars
84% place bets on sporting events
47% of those bettors place their bets online
47% of online gamblers are male

(The info above is old, new info is confidential)

Those statistics, combined with basic demographic data profile a tech-savvy, well-educated and well-informed audience with disposable income. What we disclosed above is a small 2% sample of where we begin when directing a new marketing campaign to a target audience. In summary, the online gambling market has grown nearly 300% in the past year alone. It is one of the few sectors of Internet-based commerce to maintain profitability in light of the dot-com breakdown. Our old 2002 stats reveal 170 million Internet users have visited Internet-based casinos worldwide, and the potential bettor market of 2001 stands at 34.8 million. These 34.8 million spend a per capita average of $175.00 on Internet gambling annually. The relationship between the rollout of broadband Internet access (Cable, DSL, Satellite) to residential areas and the likelihood for home users to gamble online is staggering.

Additionally, the target markets for the online gambling industry are surprisingly diverse. The largest market consists of professionals, men and women, age 35-50, with a household income of at least $60,000 U.S. living in 3 main areas of the world. There are some other markets whose demographics prove they are about to boom over the coming years in relation to gambling online, but we cannot disclose those locations at this time.

Casino Marketing

Casino Marketing

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