Dutch Boyd Likes You

I’m changing some things around about my site after getting a little bit of SEO advice (that stands for “search engine optimization”) from the owner of a poker forum I’ve been trolling a little called cardschat.com. You might have noticed that I tool almost all of my links on the right-hand side of the website down. If we have a link exchange, I apologize if you’re being notified here before email. But after talking with Nick, it seems I have a lot to learn about effectively using outbound links. His strong insight into getting web traffic is one of the reasons why I decided to signup at his poker forum.

There are a ton of poker forums out there. NeverWinPoker.com, for example, is a great forum because it’s unmoderated. You don’t have to worry about Mason Malmouth getting pissed off and banning you from twoplustwo.com. But at the same time, is a complete cess pool and if you frequent NeverwinPoker.com, you quickly become desensitized to seeing photoshopped picture with a black dick.

Cardschat.com definitely has strengths… the major one being it seems like they offer quite a few of their own poker freerolls, and award members who post a certain number of posts the password to their free poker tournaments. Poker forums giving prizes to their members is cool.

It leads to what I see as a weakness, however, and that is that it looks like a decent percentage of the posts are very short and seem to be written more to get into a freeroll than to really add anything substantive or to spark meaningful conversation. But the basic idea is good.

I think the best way that the cardschat.com poker forum could really improve is by really trying to promote QUALITY posts over QUANTITY. They could have a monthly freeroll and limit it to a very small number of entrants… like 9, 6 or even 2. In order to participate in that freeroll, the entrants would have to be voted in by other members based on the quality of their posts… so it would be basically like a “members of the month” freeroll. You could still have a small free texas hodem poker tournament and open to everyone by changing the freeroll password requirements to a single post.

Also, I think every poker forum should have a marketplace. I still have yet to find a good poker-niche forum that I can buy and sell domains off of (if anyone knows of one, please comment). And there have been plenty of times where I’ve gone bust where I would definitely want a place to sell my poker book collection, or the Card Player magazine complete set, or an autographed Scott Fischman bobble-head doll.