[Adonthell-general] Project promoting - Google ranks and such

[Alexandre Courbot]

Hi again everybody - be prepared for another one of my ramblings! ;)

Besides of programming this afternoon I've also searched ways to promote
our game on the net. After all, we have a complete playable game, which
had good feedback so far, and people searching for RPGs under Linux are
probably much more numerous than the number of visits we get on our
website! So I've put myself into the shoes of J.Random gamer, who's
looking for a good role playing game, possibly under Linux.

First, the good point: We are well placed in the Google directory. Under
the independant developers/free/role playing (or something) category we
are first ranked by popularity. Not that our site is noted as very
active (the green bar is filled at about half, which is not so bad
considering our current audience), but we appear first.

Now the bad points: the "role playing game linux" or "free role playing
game" or "open source role playing game" etc. keywords under Google made
me wonder whether we exist or not. While other similar projects (which
are also pertinent for this query) appears on the first page, no trace
about Adonthell. I think that such keywords are very often queried into
Google - and that there is room to enlarge our audience. The fact is,
that someone who doesn't look at freshmeat.net or the linux game tome,
has very few chances to figure out we are here. That's not only players
we are missing there, but also potential developers.

How could we fix that? We need to take more care about how search
engines index us, and maybe stop assuming we'll be well indexed. So far,
we haven't. Search engines aren't as clever as we'd like! ;) Take the
index page of our website. Occurences for:
role : 1
playing : 1
game : 2
free : 2
open : 0
source : 0
linux : 0
unix : 0
windows : 0
adonthell : 9

If someone directly enters "Adonthell" in Google, he'll have no problems
reaching our website. Otherwise? Not a single chance, considering the
frequency of vital keywords on our pages. If I were a search engine
robot, I'd wonder: "a role playing game uh? what kind? dice and paper?" 
-> directly into the misc category. Maybe we appear on page 20 or
something on Google - I got fed up before finding us! :)

But, well, we can easily fix this little issue. 

All we need to do IMO is to use the "description" and "keywords" meta
tags, that we haven't used so far, and that search engines are using. My
website has those tags:

<meta name="description" content="Alexandre Courbot's home page">
<meta name="keywords" content="alexandre courbot home page adonthell
romenux free software linux">

And this is sufficient to get it well placed when searching "adonthell"
on Google (2nd page, if I remember correctly). As we don't place "role
playing game" "linux" and so on every two lines on our site (which is
fine, otherwise it'd be boring!), we must use these tags in order to be
well referenced. As our site doesn't have thousands of pages, we could
even tune them a bit individually, so writers might be able to reach the
library, and so on. I'm sure we can at least *double* the frequentation
of our site this way. Just need to update our pages, tell the google bot
to have a look, and voila!

Remains to decide which keywords to put. Well, that's quite obvious
actually. But I'd like to know whether you have other interesting search
engine results, or further ideas concerning this. This is, IMO, a "must
do".

A (not so) random note to finish:
Some research about Adonthell in the newsgroups also unveiled a nice
thread, which you might enjoy reading! ;)

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=pan.2002.03.02.23.46.44.291210.14450%40michaelfleming.webcentral.com.au&rnum=7&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dadonthell%26hl%3Den%26selm%3Dpan.2002.03.02.23.46.44.291210.14450%2540michaelfleming.webcentral.com.au%26rnum%3D7

Which reminds me: one constant in all the feedbacks we got is complains
about the screen resolution. Do you think it'd be worth if I try to
quickly hack some double-size screen option just for 0.3.3? We had that
in 0.2 if I remember correctly. That way people could play in 640x480
and won't complain anymore, maybe! ;)

Alex.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org