How to Optimize Your Gaming Website From a Usability, Design and SEO Perspective

A quick web search for "flash games" can yield millions of results. If you want to shine amongst all the competition, you need to make sure your gaming website has something new and awesome to offer. As long as you polish your site so that it is easy to use and attractive, you will be able to boost your name higher into the search result rankings and let the hits roll in.

Keep It Simple

Keep It Simple

Image via Flickr by the UMF

It's easy to get carried away when designing a website, but you have to remember that people can be turned away by something as small as the background color. Sometimes more bells and whistles on a webpage can make it hard for certain internet connections to load, which is terrible for traffic! Your design needs to be user-friendly and streamlined, with all the pertinent information and links available at the click of a mouse.

Content is King

Without content, you don't have a website. Everything you include on your page, whether it's company information, advertising, or the games themselves, has to be 100% unique, useful, and excellent. Check out the content of the other gaming sites and figure out how to offer the content that they do not. Proofread your copy and check your games for bugs on a regular basis, keep a schedule of new updates, and integrate social networks so your users can easily share your content with their friends.

Ask for Feedback

Your website is essentially a product, which means that there are customers out there who want to share their opinions with you. Posting testimonials on your site will allow potential consumers to make an informed decision about their participation, and can often help you optimize your site even more.

Optimize for Mobile Compatibility 

Optimize for Mobile Compatibility

Image via Flickr by Cory M. Grenier

So many people today access the net from their smart phones. If your website has not been optimized for mobile devices, you are losing a good chunk of your audience. Visit http://www.spinpalace.co.uk to get a glimpse of a great mobile site with a user interface specifically tailored to fit on a small screen, and that offers an iPhone app for even greater cellular usage. 

Pick the Best Search Terms

There are more than 700 million search results for "flash games," but adding in extra qualifiers, such as "action" or "fantasy" can drastically reduce that number. Keywords are almost as important as content when it comes to a field as competitive as online gaming. Come up with as many unique terms to describe your website as possible and make sure they are a major part of your content design.

Generate Backlinks

If you want to make it online, you have to know some of the language. Backlinks, or links that access your site through other pages, tell search engines that your website is important and popular. There are tools online that will create backlinks for you, but you can do the dirty work yourself by fostering an online presence on blogs, social networks, and other entertainment sites.

Everybody likes to play a game now and then. If you can optimize your site to be useable, well-designed, and easy to find, those gamers will flock to your page instead of any other.

Sources:

http://www.wikihow.com/Create-One-Way-Backlinks-to-Your-Website

http://www.submittoday.com/web_site_usability.htm

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/tools-to-improve-your-websites-usability/

http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/how-to-optimize-a-page-for-search-engines