Keywords for your site

[Spaiz]

Okay, just wonder what type of reffering search keywords brings more traffic to your site:

a) keywords like "Download free games, arcade, puzzle, free games" and so on
b) or actual game titles like "Diner Dash", "Cake Mania" and so on.

Analysing my blog statistics i found out that most of my search traffic is brought by game title keywords. So this means, that people before playing game somehow know title of the game they going to play. And here is the second main question: How do they know this titles and if they know them from popular download portals, why they google for this games instead of downloading them directly from favorite portal? What the reason? Cheaper price? Or maybe extended play time? Or what?

[Ghost Dancer]

I think keywords like "Download free games, arcade, puzzle, free games" are on so many sites it would be very difficult to compete against keywords like that. As expected, doing a search on "Download free games" resulted in all sites on the first page being portal sites.

If you have any unique words you can use then always go for that option. As for people finding your site by the game title - they could have got the name from all sorts of places such as news reviews etc. so it's always good to include those words to.

Also, you may get people who are looking for something with a similar name. I've not actively marketed my website at all yet since my first game has not been released but I have got quite a few visits ffrom people looking for the game "kudos" rather than my company name "kudos games" ;) (note - I had the name way before the game came out so I'm not stealing customers or anything)

[Pallav Nawani]

And here is the second main question: How do they know this titles?
Their friends told them about it?

[tolworthy]

you may get people who are looking for something with a similar name.
Don't forget the power of bad spelling. My most popular site (number 1 in Google for that topic before Wikipedia took over) is the Zak McKracken archive.. It's a fan site for the 1988 LucasArts game. Probably half of the hits come from people looking for Zak McCracken, Zack McKracken, Zak McKraken, etc. Don't forget to list alternate spellings!

[DrWilloughby]

The bad spelling one is funny. If you look at the Prostate Cancer Foundation (http://www.prostatecancerfoundation.org/) website, they have a "fun fact" on their front page that "prostate" is often misspelled as "prostrate". This is entirely for SEO purposes.

Generally, it's best to pick 5 or so key terms that you want to be the best at, and hammer those home by having 3-5 instances of those terms on at least two pages in your site architecture. These can be in the header, img tags, or text. For instance, for my games, I'll try to nail "nature games" or something of the sort. I would use that exact term in a number of places on two pages within the site.

You should also try to get pages linking to you that are higher in their google ranking than you. Having lower ranking pages pointing at you and no higher ranking pages can actually pull you down, if I remember correctly.

IANASEOE, though (I am not an SEO expert), so I suggest you do your own SEO research. It's actually pretty interesting stuff.

[Nexic]

Make a list of potential keywords.
Look up how many monthly searches they get on overture.
Check out the competition, check their google PR and how optimized they are for those keywords.
Pick 3-5 phrases that have the best traffic to competition ratio.

Though to start with you won't nail anything with much competition so start small and get some low competition phrases as a practice. You'll learn how it works and in the mean time your site will be gaining link popularity. Then try something harder and work your way up. I started out nailing things like 'download galaga shooter game', then worked up to 'shooter games' and now trying some much harder ones.

Oh and don't set your heart on making #1 for everything. It's very hard, just get in the top #7.