Massively.com Interview

[Holth]

Check this out!

http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/11...ent/#continued

[Blue Hasia]

"For example, much of our actual advertising dollar goes to continuing to fund a Google Ad campaign."

is this new, i never notice Google adds before when i have done searches for dragons in mmos/mmorpgs until now

i would also add "dragon playable race" as a key word for when people search on google.

[Kesqui]

I've not seen the paid Google advertising either - and pay per click is ideally intended to get you where you're meant to be in the NATURAL (free!) rankings, not "act as your entire advertising budget".

I work IRL for a company that does website design, search engine marketing (and social media, and search engine optimisation).

My Google searches do not show Istaria in the first ten natural results for the following relevant search terms:

Playable dragon
Player dragon
MMO Dragon
MMORPG Dragon (though this brought up a Yahoo Answers response that LISTED Istaria)
Games with dragon players
Dragon player characters (this was the first search that brought up a paid ad)

To improve your natural rankings (and indeed the "relevance" of your page so you come up on paid search results where people don't KNOW the name "istaria" or "horizons") you ought to look at making some changes to the home page as well - appropriate use of heading tags, more relevant game-descriptive information on the home page, descriptive alt text on images, a comprehensive site map linked from the home page...

Oh, and whap Google Analytics into your page template so you can get an idea of who's visiting, how long they're staying and what they're looking at... it's free.

[Vahrokh]

Same here. I have done some SEO and Istaria does not seem to be optimized to succeed at visibility at all.

On the contrary, the most natural search of all: "mmorpg dragon" as first result will return this hit: question: "Dragon MMORPG game NOT like Istaria?‎"

which is not exactly a great advertisement.

Needless to say, no Istaria ad anywhere to be found.

[Vahrokh]

I have left a comment about this game over there. I hope it's fair.

[Eelime]

I love interviews like this. Wish there were more.