In a world where the online casino industry is becoming more saturated by the day, it is of the utmost importance that operators are utilising search engine optimisation to ensure they are reaching as wide an audience as possible.
For the second part of its SEO mini-series, Anna Loiko – SoftSwiss online casino platform product owner – takes a look at some more of the SEO tips and tricks that the solutions provider is using to best support its clients.
In the first part, we touched upon the reasons why SEO is so important – namely because data has shown that approximately 90 per cent of online experiences begin with a search engine, while the top three Google search results account for 75 per cent of all clicks.
If you are not ranking in those top three listings, you’re missing out on key opportunities to reach new players. But at SoftSwiss, our online casino solution has been tailored to meet the ranking needs of our clients.
SEO text block, robots.txt and 301 redirects
So when it comes to looking at your SEO text block, you firstly need to understand what exactly it is and why it is so important.
The SEO text block is a block of text content on the pages of your site which is predominantly used by search engines such as Google and Bing to analyse your website content. This can then be used as a way of boosting your site visibility, ranking and traffic.
At SoftSwiss, we allow our clients to personalise their SEO text blocks so that they can include subheadings, create areas for FAQs, hide areas of text to make the overall experience more streamlined. We also can’t forget that our users can also use this feature to add both internal and external links.
Next on the list is robots.txt files. These tools are used as a means of letting search engines know about the best ways to crawl your websites. In simpler terms, robots.txt files provide information regarding site permissions to bots.
This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests, define the list of pages to be indexed, specify the primary mirror site and path to your sitemap. Moreover, without robots.txt that sensitive data that needs to stay private may appear in search results which may be harmful to your site.
Now we’ve all seen a page displaying a ‘301 redirect’ message pop up once or twice before, but what is it? A 301 direct page tells search engines that content has permanently moved to another URL. Important, right?
Examples of when this can be used are to inform a search engine of a domain name change or site transfer, merging site mirrors, excluding duplicate pages from indexing, as well as accumulating traffic from one address to another with a higher priority.
When setting up an online casino that uses the SoftSwiss platform, 301 redirects are configured out of the box to prevent duplicates associated with www, HTTP / HTTPS, a trailing slash at the end of URLs.
One thing to note when it comes to 301 redirects is that it is worthwhile to keep the transfer of link weight to the landing page when a player clicks on affiliate links. Our affiliate management software platform supports the implementation of 301 redirects to the casino, which ultimately helps you to improve your SEO.
Optimising game pages and locales management
We’ve covered the basics, so now onto the more advanced techniques that we use.
One ‘must’ when it comes to improving your overall site experience as well as boosting your SEO is optimising your game pages. More often than not, a game page will consist of a game frame as well as a navigation menu. What many people don’t realise is that game pages have great potential for SEO.
If you deploy basic SEO practices on your game pages – for example a meta title, meta description and headers – you have a load more opportunities to reach new traffic streams by using low-frequency queries.
Through the SoftSwiss platform, it is possible for game pages to add unique H1 tag templates, meta titles, and meta descriptions. There are also blocks for adding a text description of the game in different languages that are displayed on the online casino website, meaning a casino owner can place a description anywhere on the game page.
Meanwhile, locales management enables operators to optimise their SEO for different languages and countries. Through our platform, you can hide pages from indexing until the pages are filled with the necessary content so that there are no considered duplicates.
As you can see, using the SoftSwiss online casino platform can offer a helping hand to improving SEO, ranking, and overall traffic!
