Did gaming portals ad to SEO?

First steps in 1995

The gaming industry started of on the worldwide web early 1995 when the cryptologic group launched their first onlinecasino. In the early stages no more ten a handful of games were offered to potential customers and big searchengines like Google, and Yahoo at that time didn't block any ads related to gaming. Clever internet entrepreneurs saw the opportunity of this product and started to built their first websites with banners.

There was no competition and ranking with simple keywords like online gokken, tragaperras, zocken auf internet would rank your website in no time into top ten positions in countries like The Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Keyword analysis and SEO didn't exist in 1995.

Evolution of gaming portals

The major impact internet had on the daily habit of people wasn't foreseen by neither the owners of gaming portals as by the companies that owned the search engines. The worldwide web exploded and in less then 15 years the domain market became one of the biggest industries since Henry T Ford launched his first car.

The evolution of the gaming portals can be easily measured. Today  a simple keyword string of two keywords (e.g. online gokken) has to compete with 1.070.000 results according to Google. If we would do the same search back in the days in 1995 we have to assume that results on competition would be less then a thousand. Ranking became important early 2000 and it was then that the first Search Engine Optimization technics were implemented.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO currently is the keyword for any gaming portal to try to achieve top of the Google rankings and achieve growth in traffic. Clever gaming operators saw that competing with the experienced affiliates  on the Search Engine Optimization technics was a complete waste of resources and time. Why try to master the masters. Instead they gave the owners of relevant gaming portals a piece of the pie in terms of a revenue share.

Instead of focusing on SEO they invested time and efforts in affiliate programs. A simple but yet effective strategy which brought the gaming industry millions. Thanks to the investment of affiliates there was no need for them to invest in SEO.

Portals anno 2011

Now-a-days it is hard to compete on SEO techniques for simple basic websites. Google updates their algorithm almost daily (major updates still takes years to develop) with tiny tweaks to offer the their customers the best quality. Keyword optimization is "King" these days and combined with good unique content a famous gaming portal like allesovergokken.com is able to achieve top rankings in The Netherlands. 

Portals anno 2011 are still important for gaming operators although new development in the world of SEO and marketing will change the position of the bigger portals in the near future. Gaming operators might become their own "affiliates" with the current development at Google, where it is possible to use ad-words for gambling related ads! 

In countries like the United Kingdom we are familair with gaming ads but in Spain it is only recently that the regular "internet surfer" is confronted with gaming advertisement when searching in Google. Soon Google will open more markets and the question is; "Who will benefit from open advertising markets?" Will it be the affiliate or the operator? Google will be one winner, that's for sure!