I believe that using subdomains Google see's each site individually which will impact your PR, I have contacts at Google I can get that confirmed if you like but I would suggest using one parent domain so that you SEO ranks better. Busy forums like this have awesome SEO value, it would be a shame to waste it.
The homepage is the primary landing page for new visitors. It has no call to action and the page does not give reasons to a new visitor as to why they might want to download the game.
In fact from a sales and marketing perspective there's an awful lot of opportunities to earn you more money.
And as I have always said my advise is free (only my time costs money) so feel free to call/mail me for advise Victor.
For the most part, yes a single domain will be best for SEO... however that might not be possible (as far as I understand from a quick terminal session) that different things are hosted on different boxes (Forums on 1.. and LFS.net, lfsw and lfsmanual on another).
Aliasing a folder to different boxes isn't easily done, hence subdomains are a bit nicer (plus allows things to scale.. Say LFSManual gets big enough to warrant it's own server. a simple A record change to the new IP and everything has been changed.)
I think if the sites have a unified header (a la Google) to the various sites.. the domains wouldn't matter so much. If you went to a forum and really cared to learn more about LFS.. the LFS logo in the header would take you there.
Is www.lfs.net, forum.lfs.net, etc better than www.lfs.net, www.lfsforum.net, etc? Or the other way around?
Tbh I've never paid much attention to SEO. Having just read a bit about it does make it a bit more clear. I noticed for example that the titles of each page on www.lfs.net are the same. I've now adjusted those to reflect the actual page topic.
Guess I should make a checklist for SEO things.
It's more a case of www.lfs.net and www.lfs.net/forum/ being recognised as the same site by Google, but forum.lfs.net and www.lfs.net being regarded as separate sites. Even non www. is seen as a separate site by Google.
SEO is not the big windfall that SEO companies would have you believe, you will easily be #1 for LFS regardless, and you've lucked into #1 for "online racing simulator", but for the term "race game" you aren't on the first two pages. A quick check of what people are searching for shows which I would rather be #1 for (graph attached).
However SEO pales in to insignificance next to the gains from CRO once you have a few thousand visitors a month to your site. I don't know what your monthly traffic is but I see from the search terms people are using to find you that most people who get to LFS have already heard of it (graph attached - but wont be as accurate as your analytics).
I would suggest that putting the forums on the same domain as the website could only serve to improve your google rankings for other terms, especially if you 301 redirect all the urls from lfsforum.net to URLs under lfs.net/forum which will then keep the lovely history Google has for the forums already. This would help to get the traffic to your site up, which you can then start to use CRO to get back out of the bakery and onto LFS full time
Thanks for that. Makes it much more clear.
The lfs.net/forum bit is interesting and certainly have to consider that.
The search word percentages look pretty accurate. I've got the same values here (just using webalizer - don't laugh ).
btw, it says 427693 Visits in october. Dunno how many of those are unique though ..
yes that's the plan. One login for all sites. Well most of them anyway. As many as possible.
And for those security minded people - there will be requests for password when you make changes to your account and other important settings.
If you switch to Google analytics you can also register the conversions where people have paid, and then you can match them to what people searched for.
I am at a loss to remember what features a standard google account has so forgive me if I say anything that is not in a normal account, but you can also do attribution modelling... You could even build in a google ping into every demo connection to the master server and begin to understand the usage patterns of demo racers - nothing privacy invading, more a case of understanding what the crowd is doing so that you can help funnel your prospects into customers.
It really is a very powerful tool now, and it's integration with advertising and organic search together with the commerce aspects make it well worth investing in - given that most of its features are free!
For me the lfs.net/forum route isnt even a question, I would just do that off the bat. However being a geek (not just a marketeer!) I would move anyone clicking an "Add to Cart" button over to another machine or at least another account on the server just for security reasons... Forums and other off the shelf software tend to be a security risk waiting to happen.
The next step is to understand how people are finding you now - or how you want to find them. When you understand what people are looking for, specifically the words in each region/language that they are typing - you match your content to suite.
I throw away the concept of a homepage, instead I think landing page. Every landing page uses language and wording which matches the terms it is designed to be delivered for - or in my case, the advert ( adverts use the same words people typed, and take you through to landing pages which use the same word again ).
In your case, as you dont at this point advertise and would be unlikely at your current stage to benefit from a PPC campaign, you need to understand how Google ranks a page. This algorythm isn't public and it isn't really understood in its entirety by any one person - but testing and measuring has shown me the following order of precedence for the current Google indexer.
1. Domain Name - nobody will ever beat you for the term LFS. But I would probably have called it LFSracegame.com (actually I would have done a more thorough keyword analysis before choosing racegame to see what term was the best and my target to crack).
2. Meta Title
2b. Position of keywords in the meta title, nearer the start is good
3. URL - avoid the use of underscores, Google does not treat them the same as spaces - but hyphens are okay. Again, keywords nearer the start of the URL are better, so with your current position and history on the domain name, if you did want to target the term "race game", then LFS.net/race-game.htm would be the first landing page you would put together.
4. H1 tag - I have a theory that in HTML5 H tags may be equally weighted, but I am yet to test this.
5. Internal site links
6. Page content
6b. Particularly the first 150 words
7. Image alt tags
8. H2 - again, I am not sure with HTML5 if Google orders H tags by appearance on the page or their H number.
9. Image filename
10. Words in Bold / Italic text
11. H3 - again, HTML5 etc etc
Once this is done, then and only then do I think about the layout of the pages themselves... Again there are rules I follow because they work better, even me who is the most averse to following rules person on the face of the planet (seriously, you should see my DISC profile), but that's a subject for after any questions.
Half a million visitors is a good traffic level Victor. I would be interested to know how many of those are first time visitors, and what the homepage bounce rate is.
You aren't going to get a sale from an existing customer as you don't have upsell options (other than high res skins which just about pay for their own bandwidth costs ) - so the figure that matters to you is new visitors. Once you have forum logins on the same site then you should be able to use a rule in analytics which allows you to discard logged in visitors from your reports and that will give you your true sales potential.
You should be able to turn anything up to about 10% of the genuinely new visitors in to a sale or at least a download, although anything over 2% (purchases) is reasonable.
My experience with commercial software is mostly in the utilities market, but when I was doing games back in the day they are great marketing. To the extent that back in the Amiga days I even released my own software on the pirate scene. If people are going to pirate it they will so they may as well have a version without a virus so that I get less technical support queries, and it's free exposure. If I was releasing games now I would probably try and find a way to track that exposure so that I could convert some of the pirates in to customers.
Thanks for the food for thought. Much appreciated.
I'm not sure what the bounce rate is. I wonder if this has anything to do with it :
Entry pages : Hits Visits 923844 238652 /
Exit pages : Hits Visits 923844 124653 /
You can see the difference in visits - I don't know what it means or if it's helpful though.
In any case I've added analytics to www.lfs.net now - we'll see.
Becky, I'm sorry but everything you've said has just been typical SEO person garbage-speak.
SEO is important, but some of the concepts are insane. Having landing pages for various search terms are garbage. At that point, you're no longer creating a functional, nice website.. you might as well be shoving paper brochures at people.
Having proper semantics like H tags and everything are great, but ultimately what are you creating? A website for humans to navigate and actually be drawn into your product, or a website for bots to spider and see "oh.. keywords.. om nom nom". SEO tends to totally say "screw humans, being first on google is most important" and then the actual website turns out awful.
As well, Keyword based domains also aren't really that useful and are non-friendly to users. Which is nicer to use: lfs.net or "lfsonlineracingsimulator.com". The second one may be better for "SEO" (Might.. no evidence of this). but lfs.net is certainly 100 million times better than "lfsonlineracingsimulator.com".
Hits is the number of individual requests to the web server, so putting an image on a web page would result in an extra hit. Hits is by all accounts a meaningless figure for all but server nerds.
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who arrive at a page but then hit the back button. It is your prime metric to understanding whether a page is working for you.
I had an account manager come to me a few weeks ago asking what he should do with a web site that sells promotional pens, it had a custom pen designer off the main navigation and the bounce rate was really high and barely anyone who used it went on to purchase.
Customers taking a different route through the site still got to customise their pens and he wanted the custom pen designer to have the same conversion rate.
My response was simple: Turn it off! Result, third best month in history and 50% growth in sales compared to the month before.
Add the google analytics tracking code to the site and you'll quickly start to get an idea of which pages are turning people away from your site.
In terms of page layout and message I can give you some guidelines to follow here too from tried and tested methods, but I wouldn't want to go as far as producing a design without taking your money .
The stuff i'm talking about is simply the technical bits of page composition, and nothing at all to do with how a site looks, navigates, or it's functional content which I have not yet spoken about - I simply can't impart years of experience in a few short forum posts, I am simply giving some knowledge and making some recommendations to Victor, at this stage, on where to start. ie: Don't begin with design, understand your business model first.
You are free to disagree of course, but you should know that my sites turn over well in to 8 digits a year and have won quite a few industry awards.
EDIT: Also I said right at the start my thoughts on SEO - which aren't entirely positive as I am an advocate of CRO.
I have just a negative slant towards some SEO practices just from my own experiences. I've seen SEO people totally destroy decent websites for "optimization", along with some stuff that just doesn't really work.
It can't be ignored, I think that just having proper, well structured markup and well written content goes a lot further than having silly things like landing pages that are focussed for every search term imaginable. I think there's better things that could be focussed on.
I also have no idea what CRO is (google turns nothing up.) Based purely on "sometimes I am intelligent", I'd imagine SEM (search engine marketing) is possibly what you mean?
Also, part of why my mind could be swayed so negatively is the people we've had work for us to do "SEO" have been borderline useless.
Most of what other companies we've helped too (implement on clients sites of ours) has been mostly URL Rewriting, proper H tags and alt tags on images. The URL Rewriting is totally superfluous in Google's mind (It doesn't care if you have /widgets/sweetWidgets/ or index.php?cat=12).
I think if you take a look at at the list of things I wrote that is exactly what it is about - my view on SEO is that as a marketing tool it is hugely costly to get to #1 for a major term and the traffic from organic searches simply does not convert as well as PPC traffic does for consumer sales. Having said that, following best practice is a good starting point.
BTW That list of points I wrote is tested and measured and although as I mentioned earlier the actual algorythms are not public, those factors I listed are pretty accurate.
The point I was making is that every page is a landing page, not multiple variations of the same page - actually that would be bad for Google because of the duplicate content filter in its algorythm. I don't think we are actually disagreeing at all, I think I poorly communicated to you some of my points.
No no no no no, not at all . CRO is Conversion Rate Optimisation - and it starts to get useful when a site reaches about 5-10 thousand uniques a month.
It is my favorite part of my job, actually not technically part of my job (my title is Head of Development) but the part of my job that I make part of my job as often as possible because I enjoy it - is making small tweaks to web page designs / wording / colours etc. that have a measurable positive impact on sales.
I don't make a change and decide that it is better - I test and measure and deliver provable and quantifiable results, and I really enjoy that. The company I work for are big believers in CRO because it is directly measurable and its part of why I love my job. I literally do make business owners rich .
SEO is not worth doing until you are trading around half a million pounds a month. If your business is smaller than that then just follow good practice, which I detailed above.
Actually here I have to disagree with you, if done correctly it can make a different - but it is only part of a larger picture.
As for SEO, it's nice and all, but like Dustin said, some of it will just ruin a website and is nonsense. I honestly doubt SEO is the biggest concern for LFS...
Good comments Becky, don't get put off track because of people which are against everything
You forgot to mention one important thing. Cleanliness of forum topics, some people have loads of crap in their signatures and for me its no problem because I have turned it off but crawlers still see it. I don't have much experience with Vbulletin but I guess it's also possible these days to turn that off for crawlers. Don't forget the avatars then, also useless info. Speeds up indexing.
Indeed page load speed is important in terms of Google indexing too, very important in fact. Also in terms of user experience and keeping people on your site.
Earlier this year I finaly found the time - well, forcibly made the time by neglecting other projects - to write a page cache system for my commerce sites and the difference in sales was quite dramatic.
However, you should not deliver a page to Google which is different to what end users see. Google frown on this and they will penalise you heavily for it when spotted.
So if you do shape your forum content then make sure what you are shaping is for not-logged in users and not specifically bots or Googlebot.
In regards forum signatures, the most important text on the page is the first 150 words of article text ( <article> in html5, or <p> in older html ) so they will have a trivial impact.
For instance: If I search my full signature it comes up as the first Google result. The full sig is "If I gave a damn about what you have to say then I would have read your post properly before I replied to it".
If I search only "If I gave a damn about what you have to say then I would have read " then my LFS forum posts are not even on the first page despite the length of the search I used (call a longtail search if anyone cares).
Of course my search result is shaped by my own google history so it may not be 100% reproduceable, that could make me look like a twat if you try it - but the theory is sound and hopefully you'll get the same results
. CRO is Conversion Rate Optimisation - and it starts to get useful when a site reaches about 5-10 thousand uniques a month.