Are you about to launch your sparkling new online bingo website? Have you thought about how you are going to promote that bingo site upon its launch?
Aside from a good marketing plan which will include how you are going to target offline customers, you should ensure that you have a good online marketing strategy. That does not necessarily mean spending a large part of your budget simply by buying online advertising or Pay per Click campaigns. It is ensuring that your bingo site will be readily available when users perform a search for the brand name, or when generally searching for online bingo websites.
It is surprising how many bingo sites launch and concentrate only on paid advertising or offline marketing and forget the little tweaks that could mean a lot of difference. For example, say you just sponsored an event and your brand name is all over certain media, TV, Radio etc. Then, a potential customer enters your brand name in Google but cannot find your site because you have not thought about optimising your site, at the very least for your brand name.
Basic SEO techniques like keyword strategies and good quality text content are outside the main scope of this article. However, your brand name should form part of your domain name and at least be within your title tag or description tag once, and again in the content of your homepage. Once your site can be found for its domain name, you can move away from using it within the content of the meta tags and perhaps focus on other keywords.
Below are a few other tips for you to consider alongside basic keyword techniques.
Of course the most important element is to ensure your domain name (URL) is common across your site. For example, keep to one format such as the standard http://www.chitchatbingo.co.uk. Any other URLs, such as domain aliases or domains without the www, should be permanently redirected to this single standard format. This single format should be used in all offline and online promotional activity and link building strategies.
Why not produce a Press Release of around 250-300 words to publish to online press directories. Submit to the top 5 online press directories including PR Web and PR Leap and PRFree. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to hire an expert writer. But you will have to take time to join the various online press directories initially.
Produce an article to submit to the top online articles directories (globally) and any further article directories from language specific countries that your bingo site promotes to. The articles should be at least 500 words but no more than around 1000. Ensure the topic is related to your bingo site and contains lots of variations and complimentary words like "game", "play" and "online". Again this will require initial membership to online directories and potential regular manual submission, but the results are worth it.
You could also add the press release or articles to any corporate site or other sites you own which could provide complimentary links.
Search all of the less popular search engines to ensure that your site has been picked up and crawled by these sites also. Countries have search engines that are specific to that region also. Sweden and Spain for example have search engines like Ya and Terra that target only Spanish or Swedish online users. You need to ensure that these have picked up your site.
Submit your URL to paid directories. One definitely recommended initial submission would be from the Yahoo directory. Although this is expensive, it has been proven to provide improvement to results in Yahoo and potentially Google. Other paid search engines and directories such as Azoos and Bestoftheweb can also provide a good URL listing and link at a low cost.
Submit also to free directories that are topic specific. There are many bingo directories out there that will accept your URL for free. This enables them to grow their site and provides content to their users. Perhaps even suggest that you could provide them with articles or press release information in return for a dedicated link.
Do not submit to all the paid directories at once. Submit a few initially and then perhaps on a monthly basis so that site growth and link activity can be seen to increase over time.
If budget allows, purchase rented links from top text links sites such as text link ads. Ensure that the link is only from the homepage. If possible you do not want to rent from a site which will put the link on 1000s of pages and stay away from link exchange sites.
It is recommended to add Google sitemaps for improved crawling and indexing of your site. This allows you to prevent certain URLs from being indexed, and cleans up crawling of your site.
Visit a number of related or complimentary forums initially every day and then regularly, perhaps each month. Discuss your bingo site or at least enter the URL in your signature. Forums with a similar demographic such as competition sites and game forums are great to start with.
Create quality content for your site and change your homepage on a regularly basis. Add any articles, news releases and fun content. Ask your employees to open up a bookmark account with sites like de.licio.us and reddit.com, and bookmark the URLs where your best text content resides. Normally this is not on the homepage but deeper within the site. Ensure that the pages which contain the greater text content have a standard URL link back to the homepage. Bookmarking sites are indexed a lot quicker than normal sites and this improves crawling of your own URL.
If you have access to web designers and flash developers at a low price, why not devise a viral campaign. Decide if you want either a video or game campaign. It is possible to pay an agency to devise a campaign for you but you could start by creating your own small flash game campaign and give it to an agency that is willing to seed it on various viral networks. You could even seed it yourself if you can do the research. You should ensure that any campaign has embedded code or a landing page the viral clicks to, which ensures that you can track the effectiveness of the campaign. By sending users to a specific landing page you can track exact traffic away from the search engines.
These are just a few tips to get your site off the ground. There are many other techniques that are available and each one mentioned here has only been touched on briefly to give you an idea of where to start. There are many sites available on the internet which can give you more in-depth knowledge of each area such as landing pages, or natural SEO.
However, just by following a few of these techniques you can ensure that your bingo site gets off the ground with a good start and that users searching for your brand can at least find you. Not necessarily on the homepage initially, but in time by following the techniques and continuing natural SEO it won't be long before your position and popularity on the search engines increases and your bingo site becomes the best bingo site around.
