[Answered] Increasing player count and website traffic through SEO

Hi,

Me again . With the new Minecraft server coming up, I've been thinking a lot about how we can improve player counts in both Minecraft as well as the population of all our servers. One good way to do this is through search engine optimization (SEO).

Quick Lesson:

SEO is how websites and companies get their website to the top of Google's search results. If I search "csgo zombie escape", a website with good SEO would be on the first page, if not at the top of the results. At the moment there are 10+ communities ahead of us in the results, although this may change depending on which region you're in.

How does SEO work? There's some secrecy behind it to prevent manipulation, but when a Google search is performed, Google sorts results by a mixture of relevancy and popularity. The higher your SEO score, the closer to the top of the results your website is. You can improve your score by having more relevant content, proper tagging, SEO optimization through keywords, etc.

How can we improve SG's SEO score?:

1. A well-rounded site

Turn steam-gamers.net from a forum-focused website into a well-rounded community website. With the new forums still in progress, we can take advantage of this opportunity to break the site down into logical sections to further improve our SEO score. Take a look at the following website:

Website with sections for each gamemode. Community name removed to prevent advertising.

When someone searches "minecraft ", each of those pages show up in the search results and serves as an introduction to the gamemode, with a subtle "play now" link at the bottom with the server IP. At the moment all of our servers show up on a list under "Servers" with no dedicated page for each gamemode. On our current forums, all our information is stored in subforums. To better improve SEO, we can create an introduction to each server on a dedicated page and have search engines rank that page high in the results. What better way to bring new players in than to have a page introducing the gamemode, and an IP at the bottom for them to join once they've finished reading?

Example introduction to a gamemode.

2. Proper SEO website formatting

I've dabbled with this in the past, but I'm not great at it. This essentially means including proper tags on each webpage and following HTML5 conventions so Google can properly determine relevant sections of each page, what to show as page summaries in the search results, etc. I think meta tags also help with this?

SEO can bring in a ton of new players, and with the CS server browser still in a fairly terrible state, many players rely on sites like Google and GameMe to find new servers to play on. This proposal will take some time to implement and it requires some re-structuring of our current site layout, but it will be extremely rewarding in the long run, especially with the general population of CS:GO's community servers slowly declining.

Thanks for reading!

This is certainly one of the end goals with the new forum/site. How exactly it'll all end up looking isn't finalised yet, but we do generally want to move away from being so singularly forum focused.