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SEO

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Search Engine Optimization

Be seen on Google!

When people search on Google, does your website come up?

We built www.thegamenet.com into a global MMO gamer's network around hundreds of popular games.

Here is how.

See also

Video SEO

Also see

Video can't be discovered on its own by Google

Uploading a video to YouTube and embedding it in your site drives traffic to YouTube, not to your embed code
  • Need an XML sitemap that correctly references your videos
  • A proper robots.txt file on the page helps Google discover and verify your content
  • Google gives overwhelming priority when the title of the video matches the title tag of the page, containing keywords you want to rank high in Google
And

SEO tools

Claims to increase SEO

Robots.txt file

Ensure your robots.txt file isn't blocking Google. The Google Webmaster Tools will not let you resubmit your robots.txt file (we don't know how often it automatically checks the file).

Find duplicate content

Google Webmaster Tools tells you duplicate titles, short meta tags and other duplicate content

See
Google Webmaster tools > Diagnostics > HTML suggestions

Learn straight from Google

Duplicate content penalty

Canonical URLs

Copy-and-paste

Submit to high pagerank directory listings

eg

Use CDNs for common libraries or not

Paul Irish
I've heard "the caching benefits are dubious" but even if its a cache hit for 50% of folks, the ms gain seems significant to me. I know Yahoo's research on caching.. I think Zoompf may have something on this... Do you have a reference on that?

See

Add "date last modified" to every page

Google shows the date last modified in the search results

Google "evony quick start guide"

Quick Start Guide - Evonypedia
16 May 2010 ... This Evony quick-start guide will get you past the growing pains of the game and into the fun more quickly! If you don't follow this guide, ...

At the page bottom
This page was last modified on 16 May 2010, at 02:52

Speed

Slow sites are penalized by Google. Spend time to maximize your page load time, it will help your SEO

Tools

Brian Higby of Yellow Gremlin recommends

Keywords in domain names

Domain names are for people. Make your name easy to remember and spell.

Google no longer considers keywords in the domain for SEO

But people link to the URL in the anchor text, so keywords in the url are important

eg
We built <a href="http://www.thegamenet.com/">www.thegamenet.com</a> into a global MMO gamer's network...

Tips

Create a popular Google Gadget
Users add these to Google Sites, their iGoogle and any place that supports a Google Gadget

Create a popular WordPress theme
eg: When WoW Cataclysm was announced, create a gorgeous Cataclysm theme, blogs will look for and add it, with a "by $you" backlink in the footer

Create a popular Facebook, iPhone, iPad etc. app

Many websites vs one website

The main advantage of having many websites is each can focus on certain keywords.

Use the hub-and-spoke plan where all your satellite sites one-way link to your main site

Currently,

www.tgngames.com competes with www.aeriagames.com

www.tgngamereviews.com competes with www.mmohut.com and www.mmogames.com

 www.tgntimes.com competes with www.tentonhammer.com, www.kotaku.com and www.bruceongames.com

If it makes sense to combine some or all of our 32 website properties under a single domain, we can do "301 redirects" that transfer all SEO and Pagerank built up to the new home. These are called "permanent redirects".

 The only negative to doing a permanent redirect is we really shouldn't go back!
Think carefully about combining sites with different purposes for the sake of a little better SEO in the beginning.
Multiple sites with strong SEO is a better model (they promote new sites faster).
For example, 10 weaker domains (PR 3 and PR 4) all one-way linking to the same new site is more effective than one strong domain (PR 5 like Stratics.com and Curse.com) doing the same.

Hummingbird 2

Find all Twitter posts about a keyword and lets you contact them to read your review

The best spinner

Quickly generate hundreds of unique (in Google's eyes) versions of your articles (passes Copyscape.com)

Copyscape

Searches for copies of your page on the web and tells you whether your article is a duplicate (in Google's eyes)

eg

PromoSoft


Upload a useless toolbar to get backlinks

Linkvana


The best link building tool, but you need to spend time to use it effectively

WordPress SEO theme optimized out-of-the-box

Built for selling one product, like a strategy guide

Add your site to social bookmarking sites

Do not manually visit every site, use

Get listed in Google News

See

Controversial concepts

Avoid using the webmaster tools.

One theory is search engines sandbox sites added to their webmaster tools vs. sites that are organically discovered.

Click-thru Matters

Google increases your pagerank if people click your link if it appears in the search results.

Create good titles that encourage clicks

eg

YouTube SEO

YouTube is the world's second largest search engine, behind Google.

Everyone spends a lot of effort on SEO to get onto Google's front page, but who targets YouTube SEO? We just started in Apr 2010 ourselves.

See

Use SEO tools

Like

Analyze your search traffic

Enable site search in Google Analytics to track internal searches. 

See

Monitor your Domain

Setup a Google Alerts for your domain name.

Google will email you every time a website mentions your website.

If you lose your Google Rank

Ask Google to reconsider your site

How much is your site worth


URLs Imitate Search Phrases

Search for "evony start"

^-- top result

^-- used to be top result

^-- new url now not found in Google

Do Not Hide Content

Avoid
<div style="display:none">games games games games</div>

Google will heavily penalize invisible content

Google Sandbox

Google puts a barrier on new sites for 6-8 months called a sandbox – your site stays there until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club -- an artificial aging delay.


No Duplicate Content

Do not put the same keyword into the url twice

Before

After

Hods lost his position in Google, and got it back when he removed the second "evony-"

A Google SEO employee said this does not matter

Unique Image Source

Avoid linking to the same image from different domains
Copy the image to every domain
Even rename the file and alt tag

Tools

Google Webmaster Tools

Yahoo Site Explorer
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Traffic Travis (the free one is pretty good)
http://www.traffictravis.com/

Submit to all search engines

Submit automatically to all search engines

Google Sites probably auto-pings Google after you submit your sitemap with google webmaster tools
 
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=$sitemap-url
(presume this is not necessary w Google Sites)

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=$sitemap-url

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=$sitemap-url

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=$sitemap-url

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=$sitemap-url

eg

Write ezinearticles.com articles

ezinearticles.com articles are used to seed new websites. Write an article and it will linkback to your size on ezinearticles.com and every other website that seeds their content with your articles!

Linkbacks and Mailing List

There are two things every website must do to become successful: Have many linkbacks from popular sites, and have a large mailing list.

Google can change its rules, and you will lose traffic. A mailing list is free from any future Google changes.

Linkbacks can come from any site, including sites that have nothing to do with your content. The value of the link is only based on the pagerank of the site and the page linking to you.

Google Tips


When you are ready, submit your site to Google

Submit a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tool

Read the article above in full

Tips

Put the most important key words on your home page

Before
Evonypedia is the complete Evony wiki, written by the Evony community, built by the Evony experts and powered by Google servers.

After
Evonypedia is the complete Evony wiki of Evony guides, Evony theory crafting, tips, tutorials and everything Evony, written by the Evony community, built by the Evony experts and powered by Google servers.

Googling for "evony guides" now shows "evonypedia.com" (it removed it the day after we reverted to the "Before"


Singular and plural

Have a page for both the singular and plural form of your keywords

eg
Googling "evony guide" shows very different results from "evony guides"

evony guide

evony guides


Ad size matters

The optimal is 300x250 to the right, framed by your content.
See http://www.hotmail.com/


0.5-1% CTR (click-through rate) is average. Gmail has 0.5% CTR.

Donovan claims $0.3 eCPM is average
He was surprised to learn we are getting $0.7 eCPM

Have one ad per visible page (if your page is long, add a second ad, extra long add a third ad)

Test different ad sizes and keep the most profitable one (300x250 is usually the most profitable)

Write more articles (size of content) and add industry-related news (free keyword-densed content)

Use important keywords at the beginning, middle and end of each article.

Find out what terms users are searching for

Increase session time per user to get more impressions per session. Have something like a related articles section or See Also so users won't "bounce"

Diversify monetization streams, like affiliate links. Example: write an article on how one can benefit w virtual goods then provide an upsell link.  Negotiate to get a % for each referral.

Longer term - build a portal or portfolio of your websites

More Tips

The “fun” side of SEO is it changes pretty often and differs for search engines. If you’re using a mainly flash-enhanced page, truth is, it’s a PITA to do. Outside of that, best practices are to make sure you use Meta Tags, have a URL that speaks towards your subject, Keywords, Title tags, Alt Tags (for images), and the more people you can get linking to your stuff, the better.

Things you should try not to do (which will hurt your SEO) is having almost no text on a page, redirect through refresh metatags, single pixel links, vile language and ethnic slurs, and “over” optimizing. You don’t want too many keywords, too many tags, etc.

Use concise <meta name="description" value="...">

Repetition matters
We prefixed every page title with Evony (and every page title appears in the sidebar of every page) and we saw a huge jump in Google position for searches including the keyword "evony".

Mis-spellings matter
If your page is about Tires, create a page about Tyres that notifies people it is mis-spelled. Don't ignore Google traffic from mis-spellings.

Tips from Bruce on Games


Traditional SEO doesn't work any more, Google are wise.

Three years ago you could blast the directories with your link and improve your position, do that now and Google will punish you.

So links in have to be real and each one needs to be unique and hand crafted, you can't use the same text around each link in.

Links out are very, very important. Practical results tell me that they are as good as links in at SEO.
A brief look at your site and I can't see a forum. Google loves forums because there is a constant stream of new material full of the right keywords. Your team can post to it under a number of pseudonyms each so it looks really active to Google.

This article gives you loads of techniques you can use: http://www.bruceongames.com/2008/12/02/15-ways-to-market-on-the-internet-for-free/

Use Google Alerts to tell you about all interweb Evony activity, then join in. Not with an advert but in a contributing way that casually mentions your site.

Create a story. Some people think that Evony contains malware. Do some tests to find out if this is true. When you have the result press release it with a link back to your site where all the tests are explained. This will bring you plenty of traffic.

Evony is just a scam. Their next one is Empire Craft. They will drop each one once it has been found out. This is not the foundations for a good business. Already the Evony scam is making the mainstream press:

Unconfirmed Tips

Periodically, manually add your url to Google
http://www.google.com/addurl

Extend your domain to 10 years
Google values prepaid domains higher on the assumption that it will be around longer
Length of registration demonstrates intent or seriousness of the domain owner, and allows search engines to filter out spammy sites

Add a video that autoplays to increase client traffic. Google favors sites with higher bandwidth.

Search tips

Search in all the major search engines for
site:yourdomain.com

See how many pages are indexed

Google for
site:yourdomain.com your+keywords

See how your users see the results, notice the bolded words

eg
(ask.com does not support this)

One page for every topic

We created this page 2009-07-22
http://www.evonypedia.com/double-saw

The next day 2009-07-23 we are the #1 Google search result for "evony double saw"!

Even the Evony Wiki does not have a page for this item, only an aggregate Items page

One page for everything is important!

Link using your key words

If you want "Evony Wiki" use <a href="http://www.evonypedia.com/">Evony wiki</a>

Wikipedia

Write a Wikipedia article or contribute to one

eg

Try to add your link to the External Links, but they will probably be deleted.

PLEASE BE CAUTIOUS IN ADDING MORE LINKS TO THIS ARTICLE. WIKIPEDIA
IS NOT A COLLECTION OF LINKS NOR SHOULD IT BE USED FOR ADVERTISING.
Excessive or inappropriate links WILL BE DELETED.
See [[Wikipedia:External links]] & [[Wikipedia:Spam]] for details.
If there are already plentiful links, please propose additions or
replacements on this article's discussion page, or submit your link
to the relevant category at the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org)
and link back to that category using the {{dmoz}} template.

Try that suggestion: submit your link to dmoz.org and link back to that category using the dmoz template.

Keywords

Your primary keywords should be in your URL.
eg: We want the keyword "evony" so we have evonypedia.com evonynet.com evonysocial.com etc.

Your primary keywords should come first in your <title>
eg Your Evony Wiki is worse than Evony Wiki if you are targeting "evony" and "wiki"

Place your primary keywords at the beginning, middle and end of every important page
Not just the beginning!

The more often you repeat a word, the higher Google will rank your page for that word
You could spam the keywords a thousand times and get higher pagerank, but once Google looks, they will remove your site and blacklist it from their index

Update your pages!
Google will penalize you for stale content

Toolbar

Create your own browser toolbar.

Profiles

Create profiles in every popular social website.

Facebook

Facebook is used by the world.

Create a Facebook app

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the Facebook for professionals.

Twitter

For some reason, Twitter has become very popular.

YouTube

YouTube has a massive userbase.


The goal is to get 2000 subscribers to your channel
Then can apply to become a YouTube partner
And monetize the videos with ads

Just like Vanae did

She also has her website

iPhone

Create an iPhone app
Release it on the Apple store

iTunes

Create audio books
Release them on iTunes

Radio

Create a daily radio show
Release it on iTunes

eBook

Create eBooks
Sell them for $20

Wiki

Create your own wiki at yourdomain.com with Google Sites.

Blogs

Create your own blog at yourdomain.com or at blogspot.com.


Blog regularly about everything

Google can put you to #1 in 24 hours

Remove the date from the url

Blog Publishing

Create your own blog publishing website at yourdomain.com using wordpress mu or buddypress.

Social Bookmarking

Delicious is the most popular social bookmarking and search engine.


Bookmark yourself on Delicious (it appears in search engines and in the Delicious search)

Forums

Google loves forums because there is a constant stream of new material full of the right keywords. 

Social Reviews

Digg is the most popular social review site.

Personal Websites

Create a personal website with your resume

Google Profiles

Google profiles are featured on Google search results.

Wikipedia

Seek out all relevant Wikipedia entries and ensure they present your perspective accurately. Add to the external links section at the bottom of the entry. Do not spam, only post what is valid.

Google Knol

Create Knols for everything relevant. No rel="nofollow"!

eg
http://knol.google.com/k/george-vanous/evonypedia/

Understand Knol policies

My Evony knol was flagged for inappropriate content
The requested knol has been flagged and is no longer available.

Here was the article

Evony is a free realtime strategy Flash MMO game with millions of human players — build your own empire!

To play Evony, visit

To learn how to play Evony, visit

Evonypedia is the complete Evony wiki, written by the Evony community, built by the Evony experts and powered by Google servers.

Evonypedia is part of EvonyNet, the Evony Network.

I wrote a new Evony article changing evonynet.evony.com to just evony.com


News Aggregators

Make sure that you are getting onto news aggregators like Google News and NewsNow.

Press Release

Write press releases on Free Press Release, ClickPress Fastpitch and Pressbox. Choose services from different countries if applicable.

Search Engine Key Words

Use Google webmasters tools to see what people are Googling for and which key words bring up your site.


Hit Counter

Google Analytics

Use Google analytics to track your hits. This is the most accurate hit counter.

Quantcast

Use Quantcast to track your hits. Many companies look only at your Quantcast score.

Compete

Use Compete to track your hits. Some companies look at your Comscore.

Alexa

Know your Alexa score. This is the oldest public hit counter still popular today.
 

Whois

Create a custom business registration for $4 a year from everdomains.com

Analysis Tools

Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/

Google Insights

http://www.google.com/insights/

Where your site appears in Google

https://blueimp.net/seo/


Google PageRank

Understand Google PageRank

Understand SEO

Official News

Copy official news from your manufacturer or game to your blog and wiki

eg
Evony released a "we hit 500,000 users in two weeks" letter -- here it is on our blog
http://evonynet.evonypress.com/2009/05/14/500000-evony-players/

Links

Link to other popular sites (even if they don't link to you)
Google rewards you for linking to high pagerank sites and penalizes for linking to spam sites

Link within your site, like a wiki

No nofollow

Remove rel="nofollow" from <a> tags
Ask other sites linking to you to do the same

Sister Sites

Create a sister site
Do not duplicate your content (Google will penalize you)
Link between your sites

Sitemap

Submit a sitemap in Google Sites

If using Google Sites, use your domain
not

URLs

Use a hierarchy for URLs

vs.

Google likes the keywords in the URL
Google Sites auto-generates the sidebar menu if it is hierarchical

Email

Use an email signature

-- 
Donovan Duncan
Fansite and Content Manager
Curse.com 

Office: 406.546.3951
Skype: DonovanSEO

Keyword focus

Hods claims ads on law, medicine, etc, are up to 80$ PER click
And game ads are about 5 cents per click

$78.30 chicago personal injury lawyer
$73.01 chicago personal injury attorney
$69.17 lasik new york city
$64.27 new york personal injury lawyer
$64.17 new jersey car insurance
$63.10 new york personal injury attorney
$61.64 chicago personal injury lawyers
$61.17 mesothelioma lawyers
$60.74 atlanta personal injury lawyer

See

Tracking


Other Notes

* External Sites
Linking from external sites is important, especially sites that are updated daily

* Internal Links
Links within your site are important

* Top-left Corner
Content placed in the top-left used to be treated with more relevance, but now the spiders are so intelligent, they can figure out what a page is about even if it has thousands of words. The suggestion is to have one page per topic and cross-link everywhere there is relevance.

For your website, I suggest adding

1. Sign Up and Sign In link

Give a deal to encourage people to sign up, like a free car wash or a discount on self storage for one month

Once people sign up, they give you their email address and you can email them deals.

2. Newsletter

For people who don't want to create an account, create a newsletter sign-up that just asks for their email address.

Offer a coupon for everyone who signs up to the newsletter. Email the coupon to the address they enter.

3. Blog

Start a blog, on a different website, and link back to NewtonStorage.com.

This will help your Google pagerank significantly.

For example, here are the blogs for our Evony projects, all linking back to our websites
http://info.evonypress.com/
http://nynaeve.evonypress.com/

Find Keyword that Make the Most Money

$142 a click for "wisconsin mesothelioma attorney"

Find Domain Names with Good Keywords

Use

Search for your game name

General Game Keywords

guide
cheat
map
walkthru
resources
alliances
clans
discount codes
wiki

See

Other's SEO Notes

http://www.steegle.com/websites/google-sites-howtos/seo-guide

Google search for "raising page rank".   Most come out to the same.   The more other sites are creating links to your site, the higher your page rank.    The more high quality sites have links to your site the higher it goes.

The best and cheapest way of course is to get people in forums to start linking you or talking about you.

You can also do tricks like having signature applets for fans.  A personalized sig that links to your site but also shows what their character in the game looks like (and dynamically updates) or just something slightly personalized but looks cool.

You can also ask for reviews from other game sites.  To review you, they'll have to put you down.  Doesn't matter if the review is good or not.  

Update the wikipedia site using your site as a reference.   Try to put an actual useful referring reference for your site there too.  Wikipedia is obviously a good and cheap way of getting links.   You can make your own wikipedia page too.

Keep fighting wikipedia.  Especially if you want  your own page.  Hell you can make your own personal page for yourself, there is NO reason not to let you have one for the site.  Escalate it.

Not talking about your forums, I'm talking about other peoples forums.  Anywhere where there is a site where evony is talked about you can create an account and discuss it there.  Try to actually do discussion and either namedrop or leave a sig with evonypedia in it.   Simply doing a "please visit our site" is crap.  And you'll get kicked out.

Google evony forums

Google review evony.  Or google stratics review, or allakhazam review etc.   These are marketing things that you just have to keep pushing.  It's not fun but there's not to much more I can say.  It's all about pushing and worming your way into their hearts and minds. :-)

SEO Toolbar


Page SEO Notes

Actual Link Text: Best Evony Guides
hyper link: /evony-guides
image name: best-evony-guides.jpg
image alt: The Best Evony Guides from Evonypedia
Page Content: Should speak about how great our evony guides are and maybe a bit about them with links to all the guides.


More SEO Notes

For more SEO notes, see
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