SEO – This is / was the single most important aspect of any casino related affiliate marketer. From my experience, you can make a little money by throwing lots of money at non-seo advertising methods but this route is virtually impossible for most people starting out. Moreover, the management of non-seo tactics requires high level of sophistication and competence.
The SEO game in theory is simple enough once you know what to do; the problem is, there are lots of rogue black hatters out there who make it nearly impossible to compete with them in the competitive markets including casinos.
Rogue SEO techniques have been around for some time, but it seems that in the last few years the “big money” markets have been dominated by those who have shown little regard for others and have contaminated the somewhat legitamite side of SEO with methods that hurt us all.
If the search engines ever decide to actually take a real stance on rogue SEO then it will continue to be a viable marketing method for anyone who does it properly.
The line that seperates good clean SEO and blackhat SEO is not entirely clear. The SE’s in general, do not condone any tactics that try to manipulate rankings through artificially building incoming link value yet most webmasters treat this as a normal and a legitimate SEO tactic. When pushed to the limit this involves scripts / programs that spam blogs etc. to build incoming links fast and dirty.
From my perspective, nearly everyone who does well with SEO violates the search engines terms of service to a certain degree. Unless there is a major change in how search engines rank sites, these boundaries of acceptable vs non-acceptable methods will continue to be argued and potentially exploited.