Poker Web Watch / Dave Allan / 10 January 2009 /

Poker players keep blogs for a variety of reasons. For many, writing about how they have played particular hands or coped in certain situation helps to improve their game (through self-evaluation), others enjoy the buzz of getting feedback and comments from other players, many others look to make a few dollars to supplement their bankroll. There is no single reason why people maintain a poker blog but virtually all bloggers want more people to read what they have written.

In the first of a series I will look at various methods any poker blogger can use to improve their visibility on the Internet using common sense ideas, some little known tricks and some new options now available in Blogspot.

Good blog post titles

Although plenty of new visitors will find your poker blog through links from other blogs and other direct sources, one important access point for visitors is through the search engines.

Making your poker blog posts a little more search engine friendly is the simplest way to attract more traffic.

In essence most blogs consist of a series of posts. Generally, people landing on your blog will not land on your homepage but on an individual post. One of the most crucial things to help the search engines is to get the title of the post right. The headline needs not only to tell the visitor what the post is about but also to tell the search engines.

Good post title: Making progress at Heads up on Betfair
Bad post title: Making progress

In the good post title example, it is possible you may get search visitors from people searching about 'heads up play' 'heads up on Betfair' 'Betfair Poker' or variations on this term.

In the bad post title example, you will attract no visitors.

Good post title: Quick Update on my SNG's on Pokerstars
Bad post title: Quick Update

Again here, the good post title may attract search visitors for SNG, SNGs, SNGs on Pokerstars or variations on this, while the bad post title will attract no visitors.

It really is as simple as that. The headline (blog post title) needs to describe what the post is about. There is no guarantee that you will receive more visitors but will cetainly be more visible in the blog search engines and you may even receive some traffic from the normal search engines.

Recent developments on Blogspot/Blogger

The headline or blog post title is also becoming increasingly important because of changes at Blogspot which enable people to not only link to your blog but also displays your latest blog title - see the right hand side of Doomswitch's Poker Blog.as an example.

So remember it is important to think carefully about a blog post title. Firstly for the search engines (so they get an idea of what you blog post is about) and secondly to encourage clicks from other blogs (to let their readers know what you blog post is about).

This is not to say that every blog post should be titled in such a considered way - there are at times that you will be happy with a witty or clever blog title but if you think you have written a decent post there is no harm in making the headline not only clickable (from other blogs) but also helpful to the search engines...and most importantly to people who are searching for the subject your have written about.

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