ThePogg.com Relaunches Website

ThePogg.com has relaunched their website which was done with the help of Desigui and Gaffg.

1. ThePogg.com just launched a new design. What were the reasons for a new design?

The previous design of ThePOGG.com was created by myself - an armature coder- and while i was proud of the result it failed in two key areas.

Firstly the design looked amateur and was laid out very much like a banner farm.

This look may have been successful in the past but failed to convey the professional aspirations of the site.

Secondly, while I am an amateur coder, I am very experienced in both the online and offline gambling world as a player and have a range of experiences with almost every major online gaming group that has I believe gives me fairly rare qualification to guide other gamblers to the safest and highest quality venues on the market today.

The previous design failed to really showcase the knowledge level of the content and as such had a high bounce rate that I really felt needed addressed.

2. Tell us about the backend you created for the site and explain some of the features you added for players and affiliate programs/managers?

The backend system has been designed to make running the site as easy as possible.

For instance, once a casino review is created an overall rating is assigned to that casino and several other factors including software platform, associated casinos and licensing are attached to the casino.

This system means that – take the software pages for example – the casinos placed on the software page are automatically selected from the highest ranking venues that are marked as using that software.

It’s the same with the promotional offers/affiliate links – once I change them on the casino review, it will change in every relevant position across the site.

This makes the day to day housekeeping very easy.

We added a huge number of new features for both players and affiliate managers that I personally feel are going to be a huge success.

To start with we’ve developed and in the next few days with fully implement a new player dispute mediation system.

This system with provide a private but neutral platform where the casino rep and player can discuss the issue and site staff will step in where needed to verify evidence and provide an unbiased appraisal.

This discussion will be kept completely private until the dispute has been resolved.

In this fashion we can accept evidence that the casino security team would prefer to keep outside of the public domain, verifying sensitive evidence without publication and allowing casino properties to tell their side of the story in full whilst remaining secure and also ensure that the process cannot be manipulated to blackmail casinos into paying players who have in fact broken the rules.

I feel this in the most fair and advanced tool on the market for this purpose.

Alongside this we’ve added a promotional posting system that can allow affiliate managers to post directly to the homepage/their review once given a log in.

This will provide the opportunity to get those all important promotions and big winner stories out to a large audience very very quickly.

This facility is only going to be available to casinos with overall scores of 7/10 or higher, to ensure that only the best venues are getting the most promotion.

We’ve also added a all new free play casino platform that will be branded to our site in the near future

This platform offers a complete package of casino games and we are intending to use this to run on site promotions once the message board membership starts to rise.

3. What are you doing differently for SEO since working with Gaffg on affiliate coaching?

SEO is a relatively new topic to me and looking back on how I invested my time and money prior to becoming involved with Gaffg.com and their affiliate coaching I can see now that these investments were inefficiently used and really failed to drive the result we were looking for.

To put it bluntly, we didn’t have the product we were trying to sell.

The first bite is with the eye and our previous site tasted musty and left an aftertaste that wasn’t entirely pleasant.

The content may have been nutritious but getting visitors to eat it simply wasn’t happening.

The rankings we’d achieved for the high value keywords we’d targeted simply weren’t paying off.

Now that we have that appetising look and the quality content to go with it we need to build on our prior ranking success. Our real focus to do this has been developing quality content that people are going to want to link to naturally and that gambling specific sites are going to want to reference.

I don’t want to give all of our content surprises away at this stage – believe me there’s some great stuff coming up in the next few months – but I can say that we’ve managed to get a senior former member from one of the MIT Blackjack team branches on board to write content relating to their experiences in the casinos and put together ‘How to’ guides to various offline playing strategies.

Alongside this they’ll be doing weekly NFL football picks.

These articles really are only the tip of the iceberg, but we’re confident that they will completely naturally generate strong links and ensure that ThePOGG.com tops the rankings without ever having to engage in practices that our search engine friends wouldn’t like.

It was Gaffg.com’s team that really helped focus me in on the importance of quality content, how to generate and present it and how this will naturally lead the site to success.

Often the best investment you can make in an SEO sense is on your own site, not off it.

Alongside quality articles we’ve focused on offering resources that are unique and useful.

Again this has been driven by Gaffg.com’s teams emphasis on providing something that other gambling webmasters will want feel they need to link to.

Our dispute mediation service will provide invaluable information on how various outfits are conducting themselves, which should lead to other sites and message boards naturally referencing our reports and out Slots game section offers the most comprehensive index of house edge (Return to Player) information available on the web.

This resource has taken thousands of hours to compile and now lists the house edge for each game at every casino that we can find information for – basically this allows player to compare the price of games at a glance.

This sort of resource isn’t easily replicated and for many players will be invaluable.

Without any hint of exaggeration – in the less than an hour that the site was down during the server shift that we implemented whilst putting the new site up, I was contacted on one of the player forums I participate in by an anxious player looking to know when we’d be back online.

We’ll continue to build on this resource and with any luck as the playing community becomes more and more aware of it, more and more people will recommend it to others.

These sort of unique features are absolutely crucial in today’s SEO world if you hope to stay in the search engine good books and future proof your site.

4. what are your affiliate goals over the next year?

Over the next year we’re hoping to develop a real community on site and a vibrant discussion forum.

By providing our readership with genuine value we hope to get people coming back again and again. We’re looking to do this through our content and resources but we’re hoping to get as many of our casino partners on board as well to offer improved promotions to our readership and not only on sign-up.

One of the biggest challenges facing the casino sector today is customer retention and we’d like to try and tackle this issue with ongoing promotions for community members.

Offsite we’d like to see our rankings improve across a large variety of relevant search terms and see a larger volume of quality traffic driven to our resources.

With so much going on it really is hard to feel anything but very positive!

About ThePogg.com

ThePogg.com is a casino affiliate site that is dedicated towards protecting players. They are listed in the Gaffg Trusted affiliates directory and their profile can be read here.

The design of the website was completed by Desigui.com and the layout and wireframes were done by Gaffg.com in conjunction with ThePogg.

If you would like to be coached by Gaffg then contact us or read more information from the affiliate coaching section.