Re: How to spread the word?

www.scoreattack.net

How to spread the word?

tabitha 02-13-2006, 7:23 AM
I think that we have a nice little community here with some people fairly dedicated to the game and I am reasonable happy with the site as it stands. Although there are still various things I want to do I am feeling pretty confident about trying to attract other players, problem is I am not sure exactly how to do this.

I have submitted myself to google/yahoo/msn but we dont seem to be showing up there yet. I made a post on game FAQs and another on nightsintodreams.com and added myself to the wikipedia entry. I also Emailed/PMed all the players I know but I am kind of out of ideas. I dont want to spam other boards or make a nusance of myself in any way but, never having done this before, I am kind of out of ideas on how to publicise the site.

If anyone has any bright ideas I would love to hear them.

Re: How to spread the word?

EVL 02-13-2006, 8:23 AM
Well, the site has been indexed by google, you can see all the pages that they've indexed by doing a search for:

site:scoreattack.net

To help with rankings, make sure you have nights into dreams, high score (and whatever other terms you think people will be searching for) mentioned a good few times on the site. It'll probably help to alt tag the images on the home page as well. Google also uses the the number of similarly themed sites that your site links to, and is linked from to contribute towards the ranking, so it'd probably be worthwhile having a links page to link to external sites, possibly just the ones in the webring? Maybe it'd be worth seeing the other sites there would be willing to link to here.

I just noticed that the front page only mentions 'nights into dreams' in the disclamer, and keywords meta tag, that's not going to help.

Change the title to something like 'Score Attack - NiGHTS into Dreams High Score and Gameplay resource'

Add text to the description meta tag, and add more keywords to the keywords meta tag.

For other stuff, keeping the topic on gamefaqs bumped would be helpful probably. Give it time, and some more videos, and I reckon more people will start dropping by.

Re: How to spread the word?

Lance Way 02-13-2006, 8:40 AM

Yep, for the moment you only really need to be concerned with working on the site itself - as it's already posted on the two biggest NiGHTS forums on the net, interested people will gravitate towards it in time, even more so if you follow EVL's Google-related advice. Getting more and more content on the site will help attract and maintain attention, and also give you a good excuse to bump the aforementioned forum topics with your major updates. :)

Re: How to spread the word?

tabitha 02-13-2006, 10:22 AM
This is all good advice, again, its a bit too 2.20 am for this at the moment:)

EVL wrote:
It'll probably help to alt tag the images on the home page as well.

Quick question, sorry but I dont acctually follow what this means. All the other stuff I will get on in the morning but I dont know what alt tagging is. If you could give me a little info on this one?

Thanks alot!

Re: How to spread the word?

EVL 02-13-2006, 1:07 PM
An alt tag is an html attribute for an img tag, for example you might have

<img src="logo.gif" alt="site logo" />

Alt stands for alternative I think, and it was originally for browsers that didn't support images such as lynx, and is just a description of what the image is. The alt tag will pop up a little tooltip thingy when you hover the mouse over an image for a second or so. I assume it may help with spiders because although they won't be able to decipher text in an image, they will probably take notice of what's in the alt tag.

Also, I thought it probably worth mentioning that although I suggested putting keywords in the content, don't get carried away with it - the content should be written for the users, not the spiders. ;)

Re: How to spread the word?

tabitha 02-13-2006, 8:10 PM
Cheers EVL, I realised I didnt even have SEGA in the keywords which was a bit dumb.... sorted that out. I will add alt tags to the images tonight and have a thing about how to acctually mention nights into dreams on the site a little more. Also uploaded slighty better quality images although they arent de interlaced to still a little blury. I will think about this one a little more.

In the mean time enjoy then new glitch videos page.

Re: How to spread the word?

EVL 02-14-2006, 10:34 AM
I just had a quick look on the web to find out about how google ranks pages, and found this which seems to cover most things. It would appear that google doesn't use the meta tags for determining page relevance, other search engines may do however, so may as well keep them maintained.

I was thinking it might help to have a bit of preamble just before the news on the home page - it's not obvious what this site is without doing a little exploring around.

Re: How to spread the word?

tabitha 02-14-2006, 10:59 AM
Thats a good idea, but I added an about page on the right of the main menu, think that might cover it or do I need something else? I am starting to worry about things looking a bit cluttered.

Re: How to spread the word?

EVL 02-15-2006, 2:10 AM
That should cool I reckon. You don't want to worry too much about page ranking and stuff - make a site that you think people would want to spend a bit of time at, and if you can chuck a few optimisations for search engines, then that's great.

As far as stuff getting cluttered, you don't necessarily need links to each page on the top banner - you could for example move the email and credits links so that they're in the about page.

Re: How to spread the word?

tabitha 02-15-2006, 8:17 PM
Yeah thats a good point I guess I will just focus on making the site as good as I can for now and let the traffic and other score players arrive as and when. Also good idea about the menus I will have a think about this.

Re: How to spread the word?

EVL 03-22-2006, 9:13 AM
By the way, I noticed again that 'Nights into dreams' is only mentioned in the title and footer on the main page.

We're being returned on page 6 of a google search at the moment though, so not sure how much this matters (since that's a great improvement). May be worth keeping an eye on scoreattack's google ranking though.

Re: How to spread the word?

tabitha 03-22-2006, 10:31 AM
I have indeed been keeping an eye on it. If you search for "score attack", we come up as number 1 and "nights into dreams high score" is number 2. Plus we seem to get about 3 or 4 hits a day from google searches. We were linked by a Dutch gaming board and seem to be averaging 30 or so hits a day which is not to shabby.

Im thinking of other ways to promote the site now that I have the databse set up to handle a larger volume of scores. I have contacted a couple of people who may be joining the fray soonish.

By the way, I noticed again that 'Nights into dreams' is only mentioned in the title and footer on the main page.

I have mentioned it on the about page which I think seems to fit in well. I would mention it on the main page if I could think of a way to integrate the text without it looking forced or messy.

Im totally open to suggestions.

Also I update the threads on th gamefaqs and nid.com boards about once a month, I dont want to feel link I am spamming boards though. It kind of feels like I am just saying "hey, we did some more stuff! come check it out" every time.

Re: How to spread the word?

EVL 03-23-2006, 2:25 AM

tabitha wrote:

By the way, I noticed again that 'Nights into dreams' is only mentioned in the title and footer on the main page.

I have mentioned it on the about page which I think seems to fit in well. I would mention it on the main page if I could think of a way to integrate the text without it looking forced or messy.

Im totally open to suggestions.

Also I update the threads on th gamefaqs and nid.com boards about once a month, I dont want to feel link I am spamming boards though. It kind of feels like I am just saying "hey, we did some more stuff! come check it out" every time.

Yeah it's fine actually I reckon - the site is number 1 when you search for 'nights high score' as well, I reckon you've got google covered for anyone that actually wants to find a nights score related site. So yeah Ignore that bit about not having nights into dreams on the homepage. :P

And keeping the threads on gamefaqs and nid updated now and again is fine I reckon.

Re: How to spread the word?

tabitha 03-23-2006, 7:43 AM
Yeah google seemed to like us a fair bit on the high score front. Just wish more people would post scores. We are getting about 40 to 50 hits a day but new new members for a while. The advice is much appreciated as always.

Re: How to spread the word?

tabitha 03-25-2006, 6:18 PM
Not sure what was going on here but there were 19 guests online at the same time a couple of nights ago although the stats for the main page dont see mto request any unusual activity. Anyone know if the forums got linked from somewhere?

http://www.scoreattack.net//images/misc/19guests.jpg

-edit-

Wierdness again there are currently 13 guests online

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