what do you think of dedicating a webpage for a single game, independent of the company pages? (say like http://www.bejeweled.info)


some pro's i can see:

much better webpage design (adjusted to the games style, not the overall company design)
only the information about the game, no distracting links to other games/sites/banners/whatever
much more space for screenshots, hiscore table etc.
the purchasing system is more optimized, you see the "Try" and "Buy" buttons directly on the home page when entering the site.


some con's:

if you have some more games, the visitor won't know about them (altough there would be a link to the developers' company site, but perhaps people won't bother to follow it).



let me take Dweep as an example - the 20 or so Dexterity games pages all have the same layout, which is good and very easy to navigate but on the other hand the overall impression of a single games' site to me is "boring" (sorry,couldn't find another word for it :)). if Dweep had a dedicated site with more immersive colors and a nice fluffy dweep on top i would be more interested in the game.

Well I know that the person behind pretty good solitaire does this for all of his games. I find it annoying myself though, but that could be because I don't like that site's design in general.

About customer not knowing about your other games though you can always link to the domains of your other site. What I have to wonder though is how this would affect your search engine rankings.

Originally posted by aspiral
what do you think of dedicating a webpage for a single game, independent of the company pages?

Every game should have its own web site and domain. It is much better for the search engines. You get far, far more traffic from multiple domains than just one.

There are several reasons for this. First, it makes the site more targetted. You can optimize for keywords much easier if the site is about just one thing. This is a problem that I think Dexterity has and why he doesn't get as much search engine traffic as he should. With so many games of different types, it's hard for the site to focus on keywords for specific games. But if each game has its own site, it can focus in on the keywords for that game. By having a site that focuses on "solitaire" and a site that focuses on "mahjongg", I can get better search engine rankings than a site that tries to do both.

Second, the more domains you have, the more search engine results you get (the domains must point to sites that are actually different, you don't get separate listings if you just point several domains to the same site). This is extremely important in increasing traffic. The more sites, the more incoming traffic from different sources. Some search engines will rank some sites higher than others, but in the end you get traffic from everywhere.

There was a time once when 8 of the top 10 search results in a major search engine for the term "solitaire" went to one of my sites. Alas, that search engine is no longer with us but I've still got 3 or 4 top 10 results in some engines for some terms. Multiple sites means more chances for top rankings.

My search engine strategy is basically the "try to miss me" strategy of Coach on Cheers. In one episode, he gave Diane a baseball and asked her to throw it at him and miss him. She didn't miss. My goal is for anyone anywhere who does a search on keywords related to my games to not be able to miss me, just like Coach. The only way to do that effectively is with multiple domains.

As a consumer/ordinary person, I hate it when people buy a whole domain name for every single movie/game/whatever they make. It feels stupid and cluttery - esp if the movie is obviously crap that will be forgotten in a month's time. Get your stupid junk off our servers!

As a businessperson, though, it *is* likely to get you much better search engine traffic. And since our games don't have the initial-push-then-fade-into-obscurity pattern of most cinema releases, it's not a bad idea. Make it different, use different words in your description, people search on *really weird things* and you never know what might catch their eye...

What the hell?
Since when did search engines work like that!
They index PAGES, not SITES! Make a whole subdir of the site look like a completely different company if you like, change the keywords - it makes no difference whatsoever to Google.

Cas :)

I think another thing to consider is how well you can focus each individual game/domain. In Dexterity's case, how could you really differentiate dweep and fitznik? For goodsol it's easier since there's well known (by the consumer) product types such as solitaire and mahjongg. For Dexterity, the only real categories are puzzle games, action games, etc. I suppose some of the action games could be broken down into the subtypes such as arkanoid/breakout. But for the most part Dexterity's games don't break down into easily reconizable genres KNOWN by the mass audience.

From the sound of it Dexterity gets most of its traffic from web searches on generic terms such as "free game downloads" or "puzzle games" and not on individual game type searches such as "solitaire" and "mahjongg" as is the case with goodsol.

Just out of curiousity, what percentage of your traffic does come from search engines goodsol?

Actually, it often does. Although search engines try to keep their formulas locked up a bit (to prevent people from too easily optimising their site and spamming the listings) there was definitely a time when having a keyword in your domain name was worth big points over just having it on your site.

Then everyone started selling www.buyvideosdvdsgamesandmoreonlinecheap.com on ebay. And the ranking system got changed again. :) (I'm so not kidding. We *sold* a few of those domain names, with affiliate portal sites on them, for big bucks. One born every minute, fool and his money are soon parted, etc etc. Thus went the bubble.)

However, "front page of a domain" is still, afaik, weighted more than "subdirectory". And separate domains that link to each other provide more ranking boost than page/subpage linking to each other. Not to mention that if, for whatever reason, one of your domains gets a bad google value assigned to it, that won't automatically trash you if you've got other domains... :)

Search engine optimisation is tricky business - do it too well and you're banned as soon as they figure you out.

Originally posted by princec
They index PAGES, not SITES! Make a whole subdir of the site look like a completely different company if you like, change the keywords - it makes no difference whatsoever to Google.


No, it makes all the difference in the world. They index pages, but for good positioning, they index sites. Google, for example, for any keyword that has lots of search results will only show 2 results from a single domain (with the 2nd result indented). So once you have 2 pages appearing in results on a single domain, having more gives no benefit.

And all other things being equal, a site index page will outrank an interior page every time. Site index pages absolutely dominate the top results in every search engine. A page in a subdirectory will only rarely appear in the top results.

As for our percentage of traffic that comes from search engines, it depends on how you define it. Nearly all of the top referrers to goodsol.com are either search engines or my other sites. Most of the traffic from those other sites comes from search engines or still another of my sites. If you follow it back far enough, virtually all traffic that is not from a bookmark or a URL type in originates from a search engine, if you go back to the very beginning of the click stream. Nearly 100% of all non-bookmark, first time visitor traffic starts with a search engine, it's how people find sites for the first time.

Originally posted by goodsol
As for our percentage of traffic that comes from search engines, it depends on how you define it. Nearly all of the top referrers to goodsol.com are either search engines or my other sites. Most of the traffic from those other sites comes from search engines or still another of my sites. If you follow it back far enough, virtually all traffic that is not from a bookmark or a URL type in originates from a search engine, if you go back to the very beginning of the click stream. Nearly 100% of all non-bookmark, first time visitor traffic starts with a search engine, it's how people find sites for the first time.

What about download sites like download.com? Looking there I can see over 243,000 downloads for pretty good solitaire. So surely search engines are not how 100% of your first time visitors find the site.

I agree with Thomas. I think it is a good idea to have multiple sites, especially for getting multiple listings in search engines. I haven't done this yet though... only so many hours in a day....

Personally the best thing to do is to have both.

On your company page, have a list of games with very limited info but with a link to the specific games (with at least one domain per game/product).

From what I've seen, it's seems to be the most effective method.


Nick

I don't have a company page (in fact, the domain name still houses a bizarro online 'zine I did back in 1995...I really should put some sort of explanation up there). But we're only making one game. Our bios are on the TCFH site, I think that's enough "company" info (company = two people in living room).

I did that for my first game.
But I think it can work only for "big" games. If I make a tetris clone, a bubble bobble clone, etc, I'd never make a separate sites for each game!!! :)

Well.. even if you have only one game, I recommand that you split between your company and your game because from what you'll be able to present your game from 2 different site with 2 different approach (althought we haven't push this to it's full potential in our case).

Regardless of how many people actual work, I'm the only one who works full-time in my company and the same thing goes for my partner, I think it has more potential.

In my case however, the problem is that I haven't work in HTML for so long that making a very good professional site has become very difficult (that's why our company page slightly mention our game).

Anyway, it's just my 2 cents.

Nick

Originally posted by Dexterity
I agree with Thomas. I think it is a good idea to have multiple sites, especially for getting multiple listings in search engines. I haven't done this yet though... only so many hours in a day....

Don't forget the power of your brand! Chances are that one happy customer will relate the fun and overall quality of one of your products to all of your games. Just because it is from Dexterity it must be good. (excellent, offcourse :p )

Second point: As somebody mentioned before me, things like "Galaga-Clones" don't exist in the "real" world, wheras card stocks to play bridge, poker or solitaire exist in nearly every household.

From a positioning point of view, the one site per product really works better.

I guess it really depends on the size and scale of the products. A bunch of puzzle games for instance, would be better percieved as a single entity (i.e. a puzzle game company), whereas if youre doing multiple different genre's (such as my company), youre much better off differentiating those products while still offering some association.

Build the brand of the product, not the brand of the company (especially if the company is going to be producing products that are not in the same genre, that would make things less clear).

Here's an example:

We are going to be making some "fun" 2D games. Those go under one name

The current product is an intense space dogfighting game which is rather serious. That goes into its own domain.

If I was to put those under the same domain, what would the customer associate me with? it wouldnt be "fun" 2D because I'd have a 3D space game there.. it wouldnt be "intense 3D action" because I'd have a humorous 2D game in there..

Of course its kind of academic until you complete the games :)

.Z.