How important are search engines to you?

[lakibuk]

I am interested if search engines bring a lot of visitors and sales to your site. It's especially interesting to hear experiences from people who are running their business already for some years. Did your visits from search engines grow over the time to an important number?

[Sillysoft]

Search engine traffic is very important for me. It provides a constant stream of new people even in between releases (when the news/download sites produce spikes).

However I think it depends a lot on the game. You have to be able to target some keywords that people actually search for. Then you have to get your site near the top of the results for those keywords. This can be pretty hard, and it takes time to build up.

[svero]

Ive had good and bad positioning in the search engines on a variety of popualar game related keywords. When my position was at it's best ... say 3rd or 4th on google I got significantly more hits and it did result in sales and new customers. However, if I had to rely on search engines to pay the bills I'd fall quite short. It's a good bonus but has never been a major source of my income.

[MattInglot]

Google seems to be bringing in a decent amount of traffic, though mostly it's search for CustomBar (http://www.custombar.net), and then some pretty odd keywords. I actually got two visits because someone was searching for skins made by someone that happens to have a skin listed in the CB skin gallery. That was pretty neat.