Avoiding Content Dumping
Our websites are not just a bunch of different billboards commingled together in a mosaic fashion to try to entice people toward the various things we have on it. This is not the ideal way to display information, as popular as this strategy may be in our business.
People love clear. The clearer the better.
I used the reference to feeling like you are in Times Square sometimes when going to affiliate websites and I think that this is a very good way to put it. The nature of Times Square requires that they present it that way, given that there are so many different ads being displayed at the same time for so many different things.
Poker affiliate website owners tend to use the same reasoning a lot, but in our case there is no need to have such a patchwork of information, since we are managing the entire process and we aren’t restricted by the same problems as they have in Times Square with all of the competing interests.
They are getting paid by the square foot to display all of this information, we are not. We are getting paid by virtue of our websites’ overall effectiveness in achieving various objectives. Ours is a much more of a qualitative endeavor.
So while we may have a bunch of different things to offer our website visitors, our overall objective can suffer if we present all of this information in a fashion that does not match very well with their objectives and may even cause some confusion about what we are even looking to do here for them.
Focusing On What We Want Them To Do
There is often a lack of proper focus on what we are seeking our readers to do, and this may also miss the boat as far as what they may be looking for as well. So we want to give them poker room advice for instance, they want poker room advice, but what we want to do here may not be made clear enough.
So they may end up either being less influenced by this message or even end up leaving if it is not communicated well enough. You might think, as in the case with the Poker Listings’ home page for example, that anyone bothering to look around will plainly see that they are offering poker room reviews on their site. If you look around you will indeed see in the upper left quadrant buttons that say “review” on them.
Given that we can assume that the primary purpose of people visiting their website is to read these reviews, and given the vital importance of this to Poker Listings, as this is how they make all of their money, is this all clear enough?
This is a very sad attempt at clarity and in fact is not made clear enough to a ridiculous degree. This is what I am talking about when I speak of the need for clarity here. They may argue that their site is much more than a place where people can come to get poker room recommendations, but we would not think that the prominence of this vital element deserves nothing more than some little buttons like this.
This Applies To Everything
Looking at this page, this really is like being in Times Square. This is all terrible in my view. This web page is simply a bunch of content of different topics related to poker splattered all over the place. It seriously lacks cohesion and organization as well as definition.
If your sites look similar to this and use such a strategy, it is time to rethink this. It doesn’t matter that Poker Listings and some other big sites use this, you don’t have their traffic and with it they can afford to be way off the mark and still do a tremendous amount of business.
We do not though and even if we did, we would be much better off doing a better job of organizing our content and presenting it more clearly. At a minimum this will involve us telling our readers clearly what we can do for them and why they should allow us to help them.
So instead of wasting prime first screen space on the home page with a splattering of poker news, I’d be instead putting something in there such as are you unsure about which poker sites are best? Click here to find out how our expert analysis will help guide you. Short sweet and to the point.
Then if you want to spatter content on your home page for the benefit of the search engines mostly, you can do it further down the page if you like. The prime real estate is too valuable to waste on stuff like this, even though it may help you a little more with the optimization. We cannot forget what the hell we are trying to do here.
This does merit further discussion though which I will resume in the next segment.