SEO for Gaming Sites? Why is it Difficult and How to Manage it?

The gaming websites today have become massive productions by the one who love gaming for the people who are passionate about playing games. Where both online game players and the owners find endless opportunities to gain money through gaming websites, at times, it is no less than a great challenge for the owners to drive relevant traffic without spending tonnes of money on paid campaigns.

Wait! A gaming website doesn’t mean you’ll always find exciting games online for free or anything like that. The term “gaming sites” is often used to refer to all those websites maintaining the records or reviews of hundred of online gaming websites or simply the ones having reviews posted by the genuine users or the ones on which you would find the interactive ebooks or white papers about the gaming trends, reviews, how-to, and other useful things.

Therefore, I call it a video-game media!

So, if you are a part of this video-game media, you might have become tired of just analyzing your gaming website and having nothing in hand.

Despite having hundreds of people out there madly in love with flash and live streaming games online, not a single one has visited your site once. A handful of visitors who didn’t even bother to try at least playing one of the games on your website. And, what’s worse- you can’t even pay off your domain and hosting expenses with such a poor performance of your website. However, it can be improved by making your website SE0- friendly and allow Google to count your website as the relevant one. While SEO is not the only option to earn money out of the online websites, it is one of the necessities to at least kick-start the tenure.

By adopting the trending practices of Search engine optimization (SE0), and working out it on your website, you can easily compare the traffic, revenue and popularity once gained across the internet.

Why doing SEO for gaming website is tough?

But optimizing a gaming website for search engines is again a nerve-wracking labor! Following are a few of the reasons:

1. No space for meaningful content
   As such gaming websites are flash embedded, there is lesser scope left for content and keyword targeting as the bots of search engines do not read it. And if you somehow try to fetch the keywords here and there on your web pages, Google can penalize you for “stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value.” Even if you write content somehow, it is tough to write extensive paragraphs about the games and fetch the keywords anyhow.
2. Gaming sites are prone to spam and viruses
   You would see almost 97% of all gaming websites are flooded with the unnecessary ads and links that appear as spammy. Because many gaming websites offer the liberty to submit one’s unique game, there accumulates a whole directory of external links to the website. One may easily come and submit a virus link to your website which you might not even realize now exists on your website. This negates the possibility of having relevant traffic through do-follow or no-follow links on third-party websites as the owners won’t allow you to share your apparently spammy link to their website.
3. The more gaming site is niche, the more challenging is to reach out
   The purpose of SEO is not only to make your website rank in the organic search results of search engines but also to identify and reach the potential customers or users across the world. And because online gaming is a niche field, it becomes tough to identify the areas of interests of the players without having gathered a great game player base.

Is there any way out?

Well, these were the challenges that make gaming SEO exceptionally brain-storming work! To monetize your gaming website, say “Hi” to the following tricks while doing SEO for increasing your online visibility:

1. Create a blog or resource section on your website
   Not only the written content is valued, but the infographics, how-to videos or trailers are the most trending ones that both Google and users consider relevant. And because gaming is niche, you can guide the gamers on how to use your website, how to play games, hacks and much more.
2. Focus on user-generated content
   Yes. You must improve the relevancy of your website, and initiate some sort of engagement on your website. If people would like your games, they come, play, rate, review and share it with the others on other social media or anywhere else. Therefore, if you focus on improving the quality of your games and services, users would themselves do half of your SEO job.
3. Create forum for the players
   While this is a golden bough for the gaming SEOs, starting it with ground zero on search results is not a good-to-go option. Once, you see your website ranking on top ten or fifteen search results; then it is advised to create a forum or players community to discuss the microniches. There is a plus point of creating forum or gaming community because if your website doesn’t rank out, your forum might happen to be.
4. Create & optimize walkthrough videos
   As said earlier, create short videos briefing your games or your guidelines, etc. and label them with relevant short-tail or long-tail keywords. The videos should directly address what the gamer wants to know, and only then the purpose would be fulfilled.