Google doesn't know Pox Nora

Told ya!

How many of these icons can you guess what they are?

 

isn't the internet supposed to know you better than you know yourself and just suggest poxnora to you by now?

 

Internet Exploder
Chrome
Firefox
VLC
Dunno
Windows Explorer
Microsoft Terminal Services Client
Cisco Any Connect
Windows Scanner whatever its called
Notepad++
Dunno
Excel
Dunno
Food Network Recipe Manager of some kind?
Poxnora
Calculator
Adobe Reader

 

I click that suspension link and is this what you want it me to see?

I knew someday pox was going to payoff.

 

Impressive! Here are the ones you didn't get:

VLC: Windows Media Player
1st Dunno: Pinnacle Studio Plus
Windows Scanner: Close - Epson Scan
2nd Dunno: Snipping Tool (to get screen shots)
3rd Dunno: Family Tree Maker

Adobe Reader is the only one that is not pinned to my toolbar. I just had it open.

 

Not enough Foobar or FL Studio on that taskbar

 

So this is what the world looks like without Adblock Plus... fascinating. Thank you very much for supporting my image hoster of choise by not being mean like I am and allowing their adds to be displayed in your browser!

In any case, I did some more search tests today to see if this thread has made any progress or degress since yesterday. The search words turn based strategy tcg still yield this thread at the same position that it was in yesterday. I'm not really sure how Google works; So just to make sure that it didn't use my browsing history to point me to a page that I might have lost and am trying to find again I also googled for turn based strategy tcg from another PC in the office which never came in contact with Pox Nora before. Still got the same results which is a positive sign. In a way this proves that we, the Pox Loving Community, can actually do something to help this game become more popular.

As @XFurionsX pointed out already, rune turn based game brings up Pox Nora at a rather high position. That is great! However, I believe that those search words are already way too specific. If somebody is going to look for a game like Pox Nora they'll likely be looking for a card game and sadly the search phrase card turn based game doesn't mention Pox anywhere on the first few pages. This thread made Pox Nora pop up when looking for turn based strategy tcg, that is still very specific but I believe it's actually possible that somebody out there will google for that. Naturally this thread isn't exactly what we'd want a potential newcommer to see first when they look for this game, but it's a start.

So, here are a few things that we could possibly do to help the Owls promote the game.

1) Come up with suitable generic search terms that you'd associate with Pox Nora.

As far as I know you'd want a handful of terms describing your content. Too few is bad, too many is bad too. Perhaps @Senshu could chime in and help a little with that.

2) Wait till Pox Nora is "ready" for publicity (Assuming that'll be when it hits Steam), then go around and post about Pox.. everywhere!

There is a lot of advanced Google theory somewhere to be uncovered. Sadly I don't really have any experience with that. I just know, or believe to know, that if we want to promote the game as the community we should use mostly the same key words but not in the same constelation. If you just copy paste "Hey look Pox Nora is like that awesome Strategy Turn Based Card Game where you have RPG and TCG elements and stuff! [link]" on a few hundred pages it's likely that Google will classify that as spam and not weight them into the sites "search rating".
Basically:
Good advertising: "This is a strategy game, it's called Pox Nora!", "This is Pox Nora, it's a strategy game.", "Do you know this strategy game? It is Pox Nora!"
Bad advertising: "Pox Nora is a strategy game!", "Pox Nora is a strategy game!", "Pox Nora is a strategy game!"
​

3) Link it, deserves special mention even though it is a part of the "spam PN everywhere" thing mentioned in point 2.

As far as I know, links are important. Google, and a lot of other companies out there, use bots to go through millions of web pages every day to analyze them. During the process they note how often they find links to certain content. The more links they find to said content the more relevant it seems and the more likely it'll be ranked higher in the search results. So if you are telling people about the game somewhere you should not forget to link it. More is better than less in that regard. Probably.
It would also be great if some of the more popular third party Pox sites could make a little section where they briefly explain what Pox Nora is, using our "suitable generic search terms" in a short paragraph and also link to the main page of the game. For instance: Poxbase.com is a very popular page among many of us. Though as far as I can tell it hardly mentions the game itself and doesn't link to poxnora.com either. Seems sort of reasonable since most people using the site will be coming from here anyway. But as stated above, more links help more. And links from frequently visited sites are likely weighted more than links from hardly visted sites. ... if you are running an unpopular Pox Fanpage these words are in no way meant to discourage you from linking to PNs mainpage. Everything helps! :3
​

I kind of feel the need to mention that all the information above is mostly theory on my part. I came in touch with the whole SEO stuff a while ago but that was really just a surface level experience. It's possible that the informations I provided are not entirely correct, though I'm sure that following steps 1 - 3 isn't going to harm the game in any way. And if you want to help then doing something is better than doing nothing.. probably! Though if somebody out here actually knows something about this whole search engine thing then you can feel free to share some of your wisdom!
(Also I forgot the name of the person running poxbase.. else I would have @-nudged them too in the hopes that they'd actually do the whole linking stuff. Maybe somebody else can do that or they'll just come here themself eventually..)

​

 

you mean @Nea

 

Everybody post a Pox advert with a link on your facebook page and all of your friends'

 

PoxBase mentions PoxNora at the bottom in the "PoxBase won't make you win games" disclaimer. @Nea, make all those references to PoxNora links

 

Great thread.

 

Some trolls are helpful, like Wallykazam. Now we need an IS/SL split hero that's a troll riding a dragon.

 

Troll riding a dragon! I would love to see that!

 

As someone who is highly experienced in the SEO field, you guys have done fairly well figuring out stuff on your own.

The "key terms" Senshu referenced are called keywords and the trick is to find out what keywords people are actually searching for as its impossible to guess. Ranking #1 for "turn based ccg" might seem like a good idea, but there are 0 searches for that phrase. On the other hand, there are 480 searches/mo for 'turn based strategy games online', 590 for 'free turn based strategy games' and 880 for 'online ccg'. Even 'online fantasy card game' would be better to focus on, as it has 90 searches/mo.

Links: I've seem some people hint on this, and you're in the right direction. A ton of links from low-quality sites is bad. A ton of links using very specific linking text (aka anchor text) is bad. It's who's linking to you that's important, not how they're linking to you and quality over quantity.

How you can help: If you have a site about poxnora or online games or anything relevant, add a few links to poxnora.com throughout the site. Not every page in the footer. Write a review, general guide, game summary or (favorable) comparison between Pox and similar games and link to poxnora.com as well as relevant subpages. *Bonus* Get a couple people to link to it (and not the pox forums)

If you're a wikipedia editor, redo the Poxnora wiki page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PoxNora. People go to wikipedia to learn about the gameplay, the storyline, the cards/races/spells/whatever available. People do not care about the extensive history of who owned it when and every change and how it used to play compared to how it plays now and on and on. No person interested in a new CCG strategy game would read the current wiki page and say "Oooh, this sounds like a game I wanna check out!"

If you have any ties to any online gaming sites, get them to review Poxnora or at least just talk about it. Kotaku writes an article every time a Japanese cosplayer wipes their rear, how hard can it be to have them write up a review or even mention the relaunch? Metacritic, MMOHut and everyone else has been ignoring this game since 2010. Staff writers are always trying to figure out what to write about, so if you have a relationship with any game writer, reach out to them.

Make YouTube videos. If you have a popular channel, do reviews, general gameplay guides, faction reviews, etc. Talk about the Dwarf faction and show off the tutorial decks or something. Game commentary doesn't cut it. Your goal should be to get on the radar of someone looking for a game to play like Poxnora, but who has never heard of Poxnora. In other words, you want to target new potential customers, not people who are already customers.

The idea is to get favorable pages about Poxnora on the 1st page of Google for keyword phrases that Poxnora wants to be associated with. If your content is on the 1st page and links to Poxnora.com, it will probably provide a slight ranking boost for the site but will definitely provide awareness and drive some traffic to Poxnora. There's not a ton you can do to get better rankings for Poxnora.com on your own, so this is the next best thing.

 

For @Senshu and the team, here's some "low hanging fruit" that you guys can do.

1. Redo your home page. There's no content, so its never going to rank for any non-branded keywords. Think of a word that describes Poxnora, do a ctrl-f and see if its on the page. No card, no strategy, no online, no turn-based, no nothing.

2. Title tags need keywords and need to be unique for every page. Meta descriptions don't exist on any page. They need to. (Have you seen the result when you google "Poxnora"?)

3. Revive the YouTube channel. Google owns YouTube, therefore Youtube gets favorable placement on Google searches. You can use Twitch.tv if you want, but you really need to add the content to YouTube as well. As a social network, a little time could see good ROI.

4. Redo the Overview page. From a user perspective, it's bad. Just have someone who doesn't know the game read it and then try to describe the game to you. From a SEO perspective, it needs to be optimized for keywords that people actually search for. "FREE Multi-player Turn-based Strategy Game" has 0 searches. "Free turn based strategy game" has 630/mo.

5. Do Adwords. Use a "sniper", not a "shotgun" approach. Find good keywords with decent volume and low bids that would be beneficial for you to be #1 for. Poxnora.com only ranks for 15 keywords total, so this could be a quick and easy way to get more clicks. The site needs to better target new people who have never played before 1st so there is higher conversion and the clicks aren't wasted.

6. Do a blog. From a search perspective, you'd be much better served by having preview posts, updates, ask the dev videos and general content on a blog than as a forum post. A regular editorial calendar and good, targeted content will increase the number of keywords the site ranks for and will also likely be the best way to obtain backlinks.

Bigger things:
1. Consider redirecting the forums to www.poxnora.com/forums. Right now www.desertowl.com is getting the rankings and the benefit and its cannibalizing poxnora.com. Forums.poxnora.com is ok too, but right now it doesn't rank at all for 'poxnora forums'. Its the unused, unloved step-child to forums.poxnora.desertowlgames.com and I assume you'd rather have poxnora.com get all the poxnora-related search traffic compared to desertowlgames.com.

2. Seriously consider changing the name to Poxnora from Pox Nora. I know, I know, but when everything on the internet refers to you as "poxnora", when you have 105 backlinks using "poxnora" and 19 using "pox nora" and when there are 9900 searches per month for 'poxnora' and only 1000 for 'pox nora', I think it warrants a hard look, strictly from an SEO-perspective.

3. Optimize desertowlgames.com to drive traffic to poxnora.com. Its the main game of the studio, it ranks for 167 keywords to poxnora.com's 15, it sees similar amounts of traffic and in the short term you might as well make the most of it.

4. I know you have Google Analytics installed and I assume you have webmaster tools installed as well. Get someone who knows how to read it to look at the data. (Like me! ) It can really show you some great opportunities and keep you on top of any potential problems you might not notice. As an aside, you should definitely set it up on desertowlgames.com too.

And just in case you were wondering, yes I am available for hire and I would be happy to make you an offer you can't refuse.

 

TL;DR because it's about adverts stuff (Not my forte), but hey you said "offer you can't refuse" and 2 guys liked both posts so far so you're pretty cool in my book. Listen to this man!

 

Lol thanks!

 

You come to think and there is a lot of people that are willing to help, that can help, that know what are they talking, and without charging 1 dime.
Its amazing the amount of people that cares about this game, i hope everything works out.