How to get the basics of SEO right for indie games
An incredibly important aspect of marketing is making sure people are able to to find you and your game. Traffic from search engines can be a huge boost to an indie game, but not everyone knows how to optimise their product sites for search engines. This is a quick run through of the basics of SEO and should give any indie game developers a head start in the search engines.
Design and accessibility
I’ve already covered why having a well designed site is a must for indie games, so hopefully you all understand the benefits of having a well designed site that is accessible for users. However, countless people still forget about the other type of visitor sites get: the humble search robots. As cool as they sound, these guys are pretty stupid. Simple mistakes can really throws them and they really don’t like getting confused. If they find 404 or 500 errors, duplicate content, empty pages or missing title tags they run back to their search engine and bang goes your position in the search engine results pages.
You can use Google’s free Webmaster Tools to help track these kind of errors and keep the little search robots happy.
Targeting key words
Picking good search terms doesn’t just mean terms that are relevant to your site, but also whether or not anyone is searching for them. Obviously certain terms are probably out of reach when first starting out: though it would be awesome to rank number one for “game” I suspect it’s not going to happen any time soon. You should focus on attainable goals, check search volumes of different terms to see what would be worth aiming for. It goes without saying, aim for search terms that will bring good traffic. It’s all very well ranking first for cupcake recipes, but if you game has nothing to do with cupcakes or even baking you’re just to piss off a lot of cupcake recipe hunters. And as funny as that may be, it doesn’t really help you sell more games.
Having good content
Leading on from the last point, you need to make sure that people get what they are searching for when they arrive at your site. Part of that is making sure you don’t focus on non-relevant keywords, but the flip side is ensuring your content is good enough quality. Make sure pages are optimised to channel people through your site to your game. Give them enough detail that they know where they are, but too much that they’re bored.
Social accounts
The big players in search have all publically stated that social media will, or already plays a big part in their search results pages. Google even released their own +1 button that directly affects search results for your friends. You’ll want to make sure you at least have the big three covered: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Ensure that you not only have accounts set up, but are encouraging users to share blog posts, game updates etc by placing social icons on your site. Every time someone shares your game on these sites, your site will look slightly better to search engines.
Back links
This is where it can all go disastrously wrong. Common wisdom is that the more sites that link to your website, the better your website will perform in the search engines. And for a while that certainly was true. But for well over a decade companies like Google have been refining their algorithms to ensure shady sites can’t get to the top just by creating hundreds of spam links across the web. These days it’s the quality of the links that matter just as much as the quality. Not only will bad links not help raise you in the results, it may result in you being black listed, meaning you won’t show for any search results at all. That could easily cut your web traffic in half. Which would be a bummer.
What kinds of links are bad links, I (don’t) hear you all shout? SEO directories – sites that encourage you to place a listing with details of your site, often for a fee. Ezine or free article sites. Spammy blogs and forums. Reciprocal link pages of crappy sites. These are all low value, dangerous links, and you should avoid them at all costs.
Good quality links are slightly harder to come by, but that’s why they’re good quality. Start with people already playing your game. Give them badges they can put on their own sites, or in their forum signatures. Ask (nicely) for them to review your game, if they like it.
Write guest posts on other (respectable) blogs. If you are in a position to write for some of the industry sites, then do so.
Get interviewed. A lot of sites love to hear from game developers and will happily put a link to your site along side an interview. Similarly, if you can get people to review your game it’s a great way to not only build organic traffic, but also help your SEO efforts.
Finally, social media is a great way to get good quality back links. Creating good content that gets shared through these platforms will add a healthy boost to your rankings in the results pages.
Try it yourself
That’s the basics covered, hopefully it will give you some food for thought with your SEO efforts. The best approach is an iterative one, constantly tweaking and improving. Give it a go for yourself and let us know how you get on.