Random babble by Paulh

It’s no secret that I now work for the marketing company managing the casino.com account. But if you had ever been to casino.com before today you will see why I never really mentioned it. The old site was an ugly affiliate portal, a throwback to 1998 web design, flashing banners all over the place, popups, and used a CMS that was a nightmare to use.

Well last night we launched the new casino.com site. No longer an affiliate portal, but a fully fledged online casino. I think the design is much better, and certainly stands out from its competitors. It’s been launched with very few of the features I helped plan, quite disappointing! Hopefully we can introduce these features over the coming weeks and months.

Part of the reason for the very basic site and lack of features is casino.com’s sister company dictating what software, hardware, and which developers we would use. Our requirements are very different from Mansion, and it is very obvious our requirements came 2^nd to theirs. Being an ex-developer I helped select the company we would outsource to, annoyingly we went with the company I rated least likely to deliver. As well as seeming very unorganised and inexperienced, the developers we went with only spoke English as a 2^nd language.- so communication was a little strained, not helped by all of the technical stuff being dumped on our content manager – ok call me an ass kisser but she worked miracles to get the site launched - while the rest of the company sat playing games and talking outdated marketing shite – but that’s a future blog post.

Well we’ve launched now, all be it without a working cms, and I am very excited, so presuming I don’t get sacked my job is to now make casino.com into the best online casino there is. Lots of features on the way, probably won’t get some for a couple of years lol. Oh yeah and I suppose I should do some SEO.

For various reasons we haven’t really publicised the launch, very embarrassing and frustrating if your job is online marketing - but company politics and all that.

Just read the The In-House SEO Life Cycle on searchengineland.

Working in-house sure is different from working solo or for a dedicated SEO agency.

The company realize they need search engine optimisation but are not really sure what that means. They know they need to increase traffic but have no idea how its done. In boardroom meetings you hear phrases like “SEO magic” and “SEO vodoo”.   Just smile. 

Believe me sometimes it’s best not to talk SEO to some people. They pick up on fractions of what’s been said, and a little knowldge is a dangerous thing, next thing you know some well intentioned monkey is spamming google with JavaScript redirecting content. With no idea of the risks involved.

I can cope with good intentioned colleagues who email you articles from 4 years ago about some gooogle patent. Or pass on link exchange requests that your learned to ignore even before you knew what “link farm” meant. They are only helping, and its not thier job to know if its crap or not. Occasionally even my mom emails me some shite search story she found on the web.(sorry mom).

It’s even ok when your boss asks why we don’t rank for certain terms that aren’t worth targeting, or will using AdWords increase our PageRank.  All valid questions from people who’s job isn’t SEO.

But the the most frustrating part of corporate SEO is being asked for your expert opinion only to get looked at like you just asked to shag your bosses wife. Worse is when your bosses look at each other then laugh - still not made better when 3 months later your biggest competitor does exactly what they thought was so amusing - yeah not so fucking funny now! And that domain we said you could buy for $10k 4 months ago just sold for 10 times that, and now you wnat to buy it.. argghh!

The next most frustraing thing is how damn slow corporates move. But i expected that! Didn’t expect the go back to your corner and tweak some meta tags atitude. But its nice and hot in Spain and corporates pay good money