I just had a look at LFS in google and it seems to rank very highly on most keyword, i.e. racing sim, racing simulation, online racing, so congrate to Victor and the team on that.
The only place i see it fall down is if you add the word "game". i.e. "racing game" or "online racing game"
I know it is a "Simulation" but to draw new customers i think the word "game" is very important.
Why is LFS not ranked when you search for "online racing game"?
I think this should be looked into

Meh, it has more prestige as it is.

Quote from nikimere :

I just had a look at LFS in google and it seems to rank very highly on most keyword, i.e. racing sim, racing simulation, online racing, so congrate to Victor and the team on that.
The only place i see it fall down is if you add the word "game". i.e. "racing game" or "online racing game"
I know it is a "Simulation" but to draw new customers i think the word "game" is very important.
Why is LFS not ranked when you search for "online racing game"?
I think this should be looked into

The algorithms the search engines use for page ranking are all different from each other. In addition, they are always changing. This makes it very hard to maintain a high page rank for lots of different keywords.

In conclusion I don't think anyone is going to be able to answer your question unless they happen to write the algorithms for the search engine you were using.

When I type "lfs" into google the first result right at the top of the list is the main LFS site. Works perfectly.


ditto for :

racing simulator
race simulator
lfs game
live for speed

Quote from Gunn :

When I type "lfs" into google the first result right at the top of the list is the main LFS site. Works perfectly.


ditto for :

racing simulator
race simulator
lfs game
live for speed

i'm talking about attracting people that have never heard of LFS, so searching for "lfs game", "live for speed" etc. doesn't work.
when i 1st went on the search for an online sim 4 years ago i would have searched "online racing game", as i'm sure most n00bs would.
so what i'm saying is: the word "game" seems to be the one that we dont get listed on.
you can type "simulator" and "simulation" all you want and its perfect but i would say "game" is the more obvious one.

algorithims dont have anything to do with this, thats for google to worry about. victor just has to optimise the wesites so the word game also picks up in the search engines. i know its alot of work, but i definately think it's worth it for attracting new customers.

Quote from nikimere :

i'm talking about attracting people that have never heard of LFS, so searching for "lfs game", "live for speed" etc. doesn't work.
when i 1st went on the search for an online sim 4 years ago i would have searched "online racing game", as i'm sure most n00bs would.
so what i'm saying is: the word "game" seems to be the one that we dont get listed on.
you can type "simulator" and "simulation" all you want and its perfect but i would say "game" is the more obvious one.

algorithims dont have anything to do with this, thats for google to worry about. victor just has to optimise the wesites so the word game also picks up in the search engines. i know its alot of work, but i definately think it's worth it for attracting new customers.

So how do you optimise the website so that it is found by the search engines with the word 'game' if you don't know how the algorithms work? These algoritms are far more complex these days then simply reading keywords in websites. Google for example is primarily focused on referals from other highly ranked sites. At the moment that is. These algoritms have been abused by websites that create whole groups of sites all referring to each other. So now Google are changing their algorithms.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Does the word "game" appear on the LFS site at all? It'd be tricky to get a decent rank at Google without it. Maybe the devs don't want to attract "gamers"?



There's a whole industry built around doing just that. It's easy enough to figure out with a bit of trial and error.

Exactly! There are companies throwing huge resource at this. So clearly it isn't as simple as changing a keyword on a site.

obviously victor has done some SEO for the LFS website so i'm sure he knows well how it works. It's not that complicated, just takes time and like Kev said trial and error. i do it every day as part of my job is SEO.

my point still stands...
i think it is worth putting the time and effort in to make LFS appeal more to the searches that have the word "game".

Quote from nikimere :

obviously victor has done some SEO for the LFS website so i'm sure he knows well how it works. It's not that complicated, just takes time and like Kev said trial and error. i do it every day as part of my job is SEO.

my point still stands...
i think it is worth putting the time and effort in to make LFS appeal more to the searches that have the word "game".

Funnily enough I know a bit about SEO too. And yes, trial and error, website changes and searching on all the engines is one approach.

I see your point but "game" is likely to be a highly contested word, "simulation" is probably much easier to target, I dont know for sure but thats what I would expect.
And as other people here have alluded to, its much better to make your site relevant to the key words you choose. If your going to go much further with it then you need to go the whole hog and invest hours into it, research and testing, thats not much fun.
Producing relevant content that people are going to want to link to is more fun and what the search engines would prefer you to do

online racing game

Drop in the sea, but if enough of us do it on many forums/websites (don't spam though!), it'll be on top eventually