Since my last post criticising helping PokerStars’ search enginge marketing I could not be bothered to think of anything to write about or anything more original for the next stage so i’m going to delve into the marketing again. Last time they wanted to rank for the keyword ‘poker’ and by the looks of it they have moved up in the rankings and are now on the first page (8th) in google.com and the 2nd page in google.co.uk. Looks like just the power of links alone is pretty much guaranteed to get you better rankings which is fairly obvious. Still wondering if varying the anchor text more would help but i’m not advanced enough to know this.
So the next phrase looks like PokerStars want to rank for the term online poker tournament in order to support their new mini site for the SCOOP series of online poker tournaments. This strategy confuses me since if they are really wanting to rank their mini site for this term I can’t believe that they would be able to rank high enough in such a short space of time. Yes it can be a long term thing for future years but people searching for this term in the future renders it pointless since it is only running for a short period of time. PokerStars already rank 2nd in Google for this term so why not just concentrate on trying to get this to number 1? That way you’ve got the long term power of that term and even the SCOOP pages ranks high i’m sure it will not stay there and probably drift back to page 3 like where it is now doing nothing.
Another thing that confuses me is that if they want to rank for a certain term, why the hell do they not have online poker tournament in their page title? Right now, they just have SCOOP – PokerStars which is about as useful as a chocolate toaster. Personally I would suggest a title something a long the lines of SCOOP – Online Poker Tournament Championship or even atleast the full name of the championship.
Now that my slight rant is out the way time for answers to the title. Yes I do think it is the best online poker tournament purely down to the estimated number of entrants for it giving it a huge prizepool and titles worth winning. Eventhough most of the events (in particular the low series) are just like any other poker tournament on PokerStars it’s somehow worth more when it has a fancy title attached to it.
I was disapponted to see that the structure for the lowest buy in main event is still only 200 starting bbs, 15 min levels and the standard high increase in levels like the Sunday Million. There is also no difference in structure between the main event and a regular $22 event which is a bit crazy. For it being such a big and special event I thought it would be great to give 20 minutes blind levels for the more affordable blind level giving chance for more players to play a better strucured tournament. Comparing it to the $70 FTOPS main event, I think is slightly better as you get 375 starting bbs a few more blind levels and also the blinds increase to 20 minutes at the end.
Anyhow, it’s still a great series and may play a couple eventhough I hate online poker and overall it probably is the best online poker tournament to win.