Random Bytes...by Ross Rader :: Can SEO work in saturated spaces like Online Games?

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Can SEO work in saturated spaces like Online Games?

by Ross at 12:24PM (EST) on February 3, 2005 | Permanent Link

Darryl is experimenting with SEO as part of the Playclique beta. Playclique is a service that we've put together to get some first hand learning about the online gaming market. Part of this means understanding how to get people to start using the service.

Pclogo6 Darryl has this idea that SEO can help him beat out RealArcade, Yahoo! Games and Playray for placement inside of Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Naturally, I'm a sceptic.

Popcap, Pogo, GameHouse, RealArcade et al already have huge audiences or are willing to make a big investment in pay-per-click placements. They are getting their placement in the Google index by virtue of cash $$$ or by virtue of being popular and linked to I' m sure that basic SEO can help them boost their ranking slightly, but Im;m not convinced that SEO can get Playclique on the first page. Or the first ten pages even.

As a matter of fact, I'm willing to bet that Random Bytes is going to get a better ranking inside Google simply because of this post and without any search engine optimization. Blogs are search engine friendly out the box. Websites, because of their unstructured origins are not.

I'm convinced that the best SEO that a website can do is to adopt the basic constructs that make a weblog so useable; permanent links, comments, trackbacks, categories, those sorts of things. Good SEO will definitely help provide better structure to what might otherwise be a messy website, but I'm not sure that it can out perform thelink-power that the weblog content management systems are generating.

Can SEO help Tucows beat out Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies or Eve Online when it comes to Google placement? Convince me.

In the meantime, I really don't know. I'm gonna keep blogging to be on the safe side .

Posted to: Random Bytes

Comments

Re: Can SEO work in saturated spaces like Online Games?

by a reader (name not saved) on Thu 3 Feb 2005 02:46 PM EST | Permanent Link

It depends on who Darryl targets. Placement for generic terms -- things like "online games", for example -- will be difficult off the bat. But good rankings for specific verticals and segments can be obtained fairly quickly. Particularly when your site can pull inbound links from Tucows.com. ;)
Also, I think implementing some high-level SEO strategies off the bat (META data, smart site copy, etc.) is important for brand-new sites. You want to get started on the right foot and avoid angering any search engine spiders.