SEO for Arcade Websites

This article will give you some guidance on how to plan  SEO for your arcade website. You will learn what works and what does not with some great resources thrown in to help you on your way.

Target
When you start your arcade you should have a target, an aim to reach the top of the search engines for a particular search term. This could be…

play games                      
free games
flash games etc

Or if you are very new you may want to pick something a little less challenging like….

Free flash games
Play car games
Free football games

When ever you type any of the above terms into Google it will tell you how many web pages you have to compete with, this gives you an idea of what you are up against.

To find your target keyword phrase just use

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

and type in a single keyword like “games” or “arcade” for results with 2 keyword phrases or for 3 keyword phrases type in two words like “play games”.

Setting up your arcade for your target keyword.

You now have your target keyword, for example “play car games” this is now your overall goal to eventually hit page 1 in Google for when someone searches “play car games”.

You will have without a doubt 90% of the time have an admin area for your arcade, where you can add games, adverts, members and the area we need to pay attention to is the site configuration section.

Once you are in the site configuration section you will have a website title, website description and website keywords section.

You need to place your chosen keyword phrase in each of these sections without splitting the words up. The title could just be play car games, the keywords section would be play car games and then other keywords if you wish, make sure you comma separate them like below

Play car games, great racing games, fun driving games

Then use the main keyword in your description like the example below.

Come and play car games here at mydomain.com all day for free. Etc etc

By doing the above the search engines will know what your website is about and will help in the search engines. But there is still lots of work to do yet.

Internal Linking System

Your arcade will be set up pretty good, the scripts you get these days are very good and they are built with SEO in mind. The trouble is how many scripts are out there that are the same, the may be different in design but they are the same in nearly every other way.

You will have your category navigational bar in place with action, adventure, casino, etc which is great because the links(text) say what each section is. This tells the search engines what the pages are about and also helps page rank flow through your website better.

The button we need to change is the one that says “home”, if you think about it this link that says “home” will be on every single webpage that gets created, on every game page, on every category page and so on. This link tells the search engines that this page is about the word “home” and we don’t want that because it is about “play car games”.

If the link that says home is text we need to add a title tag, and if the link that says “home” is an image we need to add an alt tag and a title tag if you want.

I can’t say which file this is in because every script is different, but I am sure that where you purchased your script from they will be able to help you. I use phparcadescript.com and they are very helpful or if you purchase a template from bigdog.com they are extremely helpful too.

Just say you would like to add a title tag and alt tag to the link that says home.

Once you know which file it is, find the link in the coding and add either or both

Alt=”play car games”
Title=”play car games”

<a href=”http://www.mydomian.com” alt=”play car games” title=”play car games”>Home</a>

You will see that some arcades will add more links at the bottom of each and every page that point towards their home page using their keywords in the link. This is not technically allowed as you are manipulating page rank. One link is all that is needed to help your visitors return to your home page, so in the search engines eyes why do you need more? If you have a big webpage and while you are at the bottom of the page you can not see the home page link then maybe add one more, but I would never add more than that.

Traffic Exchange

These systems are quite good to start of with, you send someone some traffic and they will send some back or in other systems if you become the top 10 or so referrer you get a link placed on their home page that links back to your arcade.

Getting a link to your website on a homepage of a high page rank website is great and will work wonders in the search engines. Getting quality links pointing towards your site is your main aim, this will increase your search engine rankings and pull more visitors into your site.

You have to be careful though, many of these systems are set up differently and there are 2 things that will not help your search engine rankings.

1. Check that the links on the other website are not using “nofollow” tags. Yes these links will provide you traffic but will never help your arcade reach the 1st page of Google for your keyword phrase. To check, take note of a name of a link on the page, hit the view tab at the top of your page, then hit view source. Then click on edit and then find. Search for the link you took a mental note of and search for it. Once you find it on the screen look to see if they are using “nofollow” tags next to the links.
2. If the link that links to your page does not come up as http://www.mydomain.com and says something completely different then these links do not help either. The are redirect links. The link will show up when you roll the mouse over it. If not right click on the link and click on properties.

The good thing about these traffic exchanges is that you will in time get other arcades joining your traffic system, the more people that join yours the better.

Hardlinks

If your arcade does not have somewhere where you can add perm links then get an area added. This area can be used to place links when you swap links with other arcades. These links will provide better quality links that will help your rankings, but do check that these webmasters do not use “nofollow” as they are all in it to reach the top and some will cheat.

In time these are the links that will get your site moving in the right direction. Swapping links will be part of your seo campaign.

Search Engine Rankings

If you have manage all the above then all you have to do is increase your search engine rankings and to do this you need to know how to build incoming links.

Incoming links increase your search engine rankings.

Quality incoming links really increase your search engine rankings.

The hardest thing you will find is getting other arcades to exchange links with you when you first start out. Why? Because the first thing other arcade owners will look at is your page rank and with most people having the Google toolbar installed it is there for you to see in an instant. As soon as they visit a site and no green appears the bar they either ignore you or decline your offer.

I suggest you reach page rank 2 before asking anyone to exchange links with you and this could take over 3 months depending on how much effort you put into building links.

To reach page rank 2 you need to build links from directories, blogs, forums and even writing articles or if you have friends with websites ask them to give you a kick start by linking to your arcade from their sites.

Google updates all websites page rank 4 times a year, normally at the end of march, june, sept and dec. But they could do it at anytime and know one knows when.

Just work as hard as you can getting links from the places I mentioned until the next page rank update. Once you reach a 2 then you have a better chance of exchanging links with other sites as they will take you more seriously.

Still continue building links from places like directories because it will only help. But now you can start asking other arcades to swap links.

If you are page rank 2 then its best to ask other page rank 2 arcades to exchange links with as you have a better chance of them saying yes. You can always ask some page rank 3’s as well. There are nice people out therel.

To reach page rank 3 is more difficult than it is to reach either 1 or 2 and the higher it is the harder it gets. If you reach a 3 then a pat on the back is in order, you have worked hard and should be proud of yourself, especially if you are new to this.

If you reach a 4 then fantastic and a 5 or higher is amazing and people would love to have what you have and will pay top dollar for a site of this nature.

Once you reach a page rank 3 then swap links with page rank 3 sites and ask some page rank 4’s too and so on.

Another thing to keep an eye on when swapping links is to look at how many links they have on their homepage. Page rank is divided between all the links on the page, so having a link from a site with only 20 links is better than having a link from a site with 100 links.

How Many Links Should I Swap

How long is a piece of string? It is hard to say but the more outgoing links you have the weaker your site can become even though you are trying to make it stronger.

The best thing to do is if you reach page rank 3, look at the sites you have exchanged with already, if some of them are slacking and dropped in page rank then remove their linkfrom your website. Yes this seems harsh, but why should you work hard and someone else benefit from your link if they are not returning the favour. If you had a page rank 6 website would you swap links with a page rank 1 website? Or would they swap with you?

Some sites only have a few exchanges; others have 20 or 30 when some have none. It’s a fine line but doing exchanges will help you.

If you reach page rank 3 or above then you are on your way, I wish you all the best of luck.