What should the home page be for a combined sports/poker/casino site?

[baldidiot]

One of the sites I'm working on is a combined sports/casino/poker/bingo portal and I can't decide what the home page should be.

Should it be a summary of all 4 sections, or should it just go to the home page for a specific section (which is what a lot of the operators do when you type their domain in - ladbrokes, will hill etc..). It will be easy and obvious for the users how to switch between the catagories.

eg: mysite.com redirects to mysite.com/casino

If it's the latter, what do you think the "home" catagory should be - sports, casino or poker?

[thepokerkeep]

I would go with the more generic home page where all 4 were listed.

[catchingsmoke]

to be honest these combined sites are very difficult to monetise well, most if not all affiliates will tell you they don't really work, not only for search purposes but in general it's hard to get your call to action right when your trying to appeal to too many markets.

[rod.collins]

to be honest these combined sites are very difficult to monetise well, most if not all affiliates will tell you they don't really work, not only for search purposes but in general it's hard to get your call to action right when your trying to appeal to too many markets.

Me I personally believe it all depends on the context and your long term goals, it might be harder to be more diversified, because it will take longer to focus on certain specific keywords, but in the long run I believe a versatile site offering various games will do better in the long run, if you can actually wait 4 or 5 years. I am always looking at the long term.

The one product I would probably focus on 100% percent would be a site for example on mobile gambling where there is a smaller audience. So you would have to focus hard on cell phone users to generate decent traffic.

[Former Member 14]

Hi,

I'd be deciding what is my main interest, the niche that will bring in the most and use that for my TLD content. The other niche topics I'd move to sub-domains.

EG - If the casino is on yourdomain.com I'd use the following:
sports.yourdomain.com
bingo.yourdomain.com
poker.yourdomain.com

Trying to cram all these niches into one home page or one site will heavily dilute your keywords and phrases. Where as establishing mini site niche's, linked from your main TLD is going to work for you.

Besides, it also gives you a wider path of flexibility if/when one of your niche's grows beyond your expectations.

I've used this on a number of projects and it has not hindered my Google success, in fact its been highly beneficial for all my SERPS.

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NB - don't use a redirect to yourdomain.com/casino. If casino is your top niche use that on yourdomain.com and give the other niche's their own unique sub-domains.

As a side note, some hosting services don't use .htaccess properly if located in a 2'nd level folder. EG adding a forum or blog that requires a URL re-write may not work for you if you were to use yourdomain.com/sports/

Where as sports.yourdomain.com will always process a .htaccess file correctly.



Cheers



Dave

[baldidiot]

Thank you all for your input!

I like the idea of each having it's own sub domain (although it means a lot more work before launching! doh!) and using the casino site as the main page.

Aussiedave, would you say that this format:

mysite.com <-- casino
sports.mysite.com
poker.mysite.com
bingo.mysite.com

would be better than having a casino.mysite.com domain with a 301 redirect from the home page?