Andy Blackburn – SEO Consultant

Real Deal Poker, who I covered just after the trip to Prague, seem to be going from strength to strength at the moment, with a number of big sponsorships at the WSOP.

As the image shows, Pat Hartnett was seen promoting Real Deal Poker, wearing their patch on his shirt during the 2010 WSOP in Las Vegas, but this only came after (the aptly named) Evander “The Real Deal” Holyfield was also seen in Real Deal Poker’s colours, and has now partnered with the Isle of Man based poker provider who are offering a “Beat the Champ” promotion offering registered players the chance to play and “knock out” the 5 time World Heavyweight Champ!

The face to face match against Evander will be held in Leicester Square, London as part of the now infamous Poker in the Park but there are a few rounds of qualifiers to go through first.

Click through on the banner below for more information on the promotion before signing up to Real Deal Poker to be in for a chance of qualifying to play against the Champ himself!

A bit of flagrant promotion for some mates of mine, but Les and Darren are in the process of launching a new company offering IT products and services. Based near Duquesa, in Sabanillas on the Costa del Sol, they’re going to be offering all manner of IT services including new hardware and software, networks and cabling including the installation of broadband (which, believe you me, can be a nightmare in Spain) and setting up your wireless network.

Darren is also a qualified and experienced web designer so those looking for a website are serviced here too, and who knows, I may even jump on the bandwagon and help with SEO and PPC management ;)

Les has a serious IT background and has just moved over to the Costa bringing a wealth of knowledge with him, and I have no doubt that IT World is going to be a great addition to the area. There are very few people offering IT services properly out here (although their are a good number of shysters operating on the coast) so I really think the guys are filling a much needed gap in the market and I’m wishing them the best of luck for the future!

A search for a place to rest my head near to Exeter Airport (I had an early flight to catch yesterday) led me to perhaps the closest airport hotel, ever! Situated between the two runways at Exeter, this was going to be ultra, or even über-convenient!

Alas, Google Maps had failed me, as a quick look at the postcode of said hotel, and indeed the image which showed no nearby buildings, quickly alerted my suspicions. The Trelawney Hotel is actually in Torquay:

Google Maps, well and truly, failed!

I’m currently in transit between Prague and home, and going over my notes from the iGB Super Show, and there is one outfit that really caught my attention. Real Deal Poker‘s platform is something refreshing in what I feel has become a reasonably stagnant market place. There are poker products aplenty out there, all have their pros and cons and all are, within reason, relatively similar in their offering.

Real Deal Poker is the only poker software developer at the moment, which has shied away from RNGs (Random Number Generators) and has developed a platform that actually involves real decks of cards being shuffled (though be it by machines) in order to create a matrix of permutations, from which their poker platform pulls a deck. From my conversations with Gene Gioia the system works something akin to the following:

• A deck of cards (with barcodes) is shuffled by machine
• The order of the cards following the shuffle is recorded and placed in a matrix
• When this particular “deck” is pulled by the poker client, a player (here’s the random element) gets to cut the deck at a random position
• The cards are then dealt in order from that position, to create the rest of the gameplay

The client itself isn’t much different from any of the others that are readily available, with the exception of the burn pot. The dealer shows a burn card being placed to the side of the deck before each phase of play, just like in a real game… which begs the question, why do we never see a burn stack on any other software platform?

The guys over at Real Deal quoted a piece of research which stated that a large percentage (up to 30%!) of players interviewed at land based poker games state trust issues regarding RNGs as their primary reason for not playing online. By eliminating that hurdle, RDP are inviting a target market which would vastly supersede the current number of online poker players, to join the online poker world!

There is a great vid (albeit a little long) of Gene demoing his platform below, and for any of you wanting to see it in action, hope over to www.realdealpoker.com, take a look, and enjoy some free bucks on me:

I am always championing Google Analytics as my analytical package of choice, not least because it’s free, but because I feel the functionality you get out of it, as a free package, is second to none when compared to the rest of the free/nearly free products out there. Out of the box, GA works with minimal setup or configuration, and works really bloody well.

Tracking sub-domains with Google Analytics also works, with the minimal of configuration, by simply amending your GA code (this is the most up to date version, just by the way):

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

To read:

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.yourdomain.com']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Simple enough? Well, here is a a nice tidbit of information, if you have two pages on your primary and sub-domains, that share the same page name (i.e. index.html), then Google Analytics will combine the statistics for these two pages artificially inflating the statistics for index.html on the primary domain. As my good friend Rob put it: “I wonder who decided that this was a sensible default?” Sensible default indeed!

More endless searching led me to information on setting up a filter, which will supposedly split your data and track traffic on both sub-domains and the primary domain:

Unfortunately, this didn’t work out too well either in my tests:

So, calling on the Twitterverse, David Whitehouse from Bronco volunteered to help out and see if we could get this fixed, and came across the following filter configuration from Brian Clifton’s book:

This has now been set up, and I’m running a few more tests on some new pages and will report on results as soon as they’re in…

Update

So it’s the morning after the afternoon before, and I can’t say the results are overly brilliant, especially when I spot the following duplication in my analytics overview:

Furthermore, the subdomain I have been testing is being treated like a subdirectory in the reporting:

So when you hover over the “Visit this page” link in GA, you get the following in your status bar:

Not what I would call perfect, by any means.

Really quite proud to be associated with this:

LONDON, UK – 6th May 2010 –GameOn Marketing Limited and GameOn Affiliates Limited will today see the launch of GameOn Consultants Limited (GameOn Consultants).

GameOn Consultants is a “one stop shop” that offers operators practical assistance and advice on all aspects of running a casino, poker, sports, bingo, live casino and soft games operation. continue reading…

Whilst adding some social links to a client site, I had a quick search for a facebook button to chuck in a sidebar. Anyone else notices something funky about this SERP:

See for yourself: Google SERP

Unfortunately the page seems to be down, but there’s still a cached version here, screenshot-ed below:

Enough amusement for one day :)

This morning, a slightly misplaced click, opened up a page full of code which caught my attention. Who knew that the page source for the Developer Toolset within Google Chrome would start with:

Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

?
See for yourself. Load up a fresh Chrome window, click the page icon, and scroll down to Developer > Developer Tools:

Right click anywhere in that window, and select View Source:

Tada:

A bit of light humour in the lead up to April 1st. Malcolm Coles has launched CRAP to avoid some of those usual web-based issues we see on the dreaded April-fools’ Day.

As he puts it, those in the UK and Europe start seeing April-fools based jokes and posts, technically, a day earlier than we should, where as those in the US, once they feel safe after the midday cut off, are duped once more in the evening as those of us closer to Greenwich start pranking about!

CRAP – The Campaign for a Recognised April-fools Period calls for an internationally recognised, 24 hour period, spanning March 31st and April 1st.

WordPress App for Android – Thoughts

Android’s WordPress App may be light on the features, dull and not overly exciting, but it does the job. Quite how well it does the job will only be truly apparent after I hit the publish button at the end of this post!

WordPress App for Android – What’s missing?

Straight away, we notice the lack of 1 touch buttons to insert H2 tags, most of the nice plugin functionality for SEO stuff and no functionality to upload media from the phone into the post. Makes live blogging a bit of a chore! Still, it’s getting there!