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SCCG Weekly Newsletter Volume 24

January 22, 2021

SCCG LIVE MEETINGS IN OKLAHOMA AND ARIZONA

Stephen Crystal will be conducting meetings with clients and partners in Oklahoma February 1-5, and in Arizona February 15-20.

If you would like to reach out to Stephen regarding a meeting during this period, please contact him directly at stephen.crystal@sccgmanagement.com or by cell or WhatsApp at (702) 427-9354.

A Tale of Jefferson Starship and Search Engine Optimization

There’s a great, albeit apocryphal story about the origin of search engine optimization from the late 1990s involving the rock band Jefferson Starship. According to legend, Jefferson Starship band manager, William Carl Thompson, was trying to brag about Jefferson Starship’s digital relevance by showing off their new website to a club promoter — but Thompson couldn’t remember the URL. Mid-brag, he tried to look it up and found their official website on the search results’ fourth page.

As the story goes, Thompson called the Cybernautics SVP of audience development from the road at 3:00 AM, to tear into him about the page ranking of the shiny new website Cybernautics developed for the band.

Back then, search engines ranked websites by the number of times keywords appeared on their pages. Cybernautics used this knowledge to get Jefferson Starship’s website pushed to number one by having the band’s name repeated over and over again in little black letters against the web page’s black background.

Alas, it’s no longer this simple to get rankings like this. Today, search engine optimization is Google optimization, and actually, we’re not optimizing Google. What we’re doing is optimizing the recognition of a web page’s value in the context of a particular search.

From a technical standpoint, this means making sure that the way we publish web content is as friendly to Google’s web crawlers as possible in terms of the content’s quality and the metadata on the web page, which helps put the content in context for Google.

Additionally, and ideally organically, we help other web properties understand and recognize our content’s value by having those other web properties link to our website’s content. Suppose Google sees that other websites (that it believes are authoritative on a particular topic) refer to your website in the context of that topic. In that case, Google will eventually infer that you, too, are an authority worth ranking highly. Search engine optimization today is considerably more nuanced than this in terms of actual execution. Fundamentally, however, you are best served by having high-value, relevant content on the website, which is recognized as such by the internet.

Still, being qualitatively and quantitatively amazing isn’t enough. “If you build it, they will come” is no more relevant for search engine ranking than it is for a greenfield casino development project. You have to work at maintaining relevance in the context of content on the internet. According to IDC, 44 billion GB of data was created per day in 2016. They estimate this will grow to 463 billion GB of data daily by 2025.

So, as we wouldn’t open a casino without advertising, marketing, and PR teams, neither would we deploy our web properties without those things AND search engine optimization expertise.

If you’re interested in discussing strategic search engine optimization capabilities with world-class expertise specialized in online sports wagering and iGaming, please reach out. We would love to talk to you about what we can do for you and your team.