How to Use SEO to Drive Search Engine Traffic to Flash Online Games

Because the content within a Flash movie is not indexable by search engines, many people think it’s not possible to optimise Flash games and websites and get significant organic search engine traffic.

While it’s true good, keyword targeted content alone does help with search engine ranking for non-competitive keywords, it’s links to content that enable you to get high ranking for competitive keywords (especially in Google). For just a few hours work, building keyword targeted links to your Flash web game can provide a great long term strategy for driving extra traffic above and beyond what your viral game seeding would provide.

I’m going to go through an example of a football penalty shootout Flash game and run through the process.

First of all I recommend you have the game set up on it’s own domain as a stand alone website. If it’s in a sub-domain or sub-directory it’s going to make building links that bit harder. Then you need to do your keyword research. You want variations on high traffic keyword phrases. The Google Adwords keyword tool provides suggestions based on phrases you input and now provides actual Google search figures for the keyword phrases displayed, so this is ideal for building our keyword list. So I put the following phrases into the keyword tool:

football flash game
soccer flash game
penalty shootout flash game
football online game
soccer online game
penalty shootout online game
football web game
soccer web game
penalty shootout web game

Now click the ‘Approx Avg Search Volume’ heading to sort from highest to lowest as shown below:

At the top we get related terms, then below them we get another table of suggested keyword phrases. Based on traffic numbers, I’d probably go for something like ‘Play Free Football Flash Online Game – Penalty Shootout‘ as my main keyword phrase. It contains various combinations of the highest traffic phrases and reads relatively well, without just being a spammy list of keywords. This would be my page Title tag for the game. (Always make sure your Title tag is no more than 70 characters long). Then I’d write a page description including all these keywords. You can make this quite a bit longer, maybe something like ‘Play this great Flash football online penalty shootout game free…’. (Feel free to elaborate on the description, ideally at least a couple of plain English sentences, you don’t have to worry about a character limit on this). Now we have our game page optimised for our main keyword phrases,  it’s time to build some links.

Our first place to go and submit the game is the social bookmarking site digg.com. This is a great way to get your online game indexed on search engines within a couple of hours and provide a valuable instant rankings boost. Make sure you use the same title and description we used on the game page for your submission.

Now you’re going to submit your game to some free directories. Despite the fact that Google has supposedly devalued directory links, I still get good results with them. Just make sure you NEVER sign up for reciprocal or paid links, only use totally free submission directories with no strings attached. Going back to what I said earlier, some directories will accept deep links (pages other than your website homepage), some will not. This is why it’s quite important to make sure your game is on it’s own domain.

Before we go ahead and start submitting it’s a good idea to vary the keyword phrases we’re going to use as anchor text for our links, to stop them appearing too spammy. Say we plan to submit to 50 directories, we’ll need 50 variations of our keyword phrase. For this we’re going to use one of the many free online keyword combination tools (e.g. keyword lizard). Enter your keywords as shown below:

This will give us a list of around a 100 unique targeted keyword phrases which we can start to use for our anchor text in directory links.

You’re now going to go through your list of 50 free submission directories and use your keywords phrases list for your link titles. Always read and follow the submission guidelines carefully for each directory. It’ll increase your chances of getting accepted. I’d also suggest creating a new free email account specifically for your submissions, so you don’t end up with loads of spam in your own inbox.

And there you go, we’re done. As I mentioned earlier though, treat this as a long term strategy. You’re unlikely to boost Google rankings and traffic to your flash game immediately. Apart from the fact that some directory submissions can take weeks or even months to go through, it can take Google a while to index those links and transfer the benefit onto your website.

To help you along with this I’m even going to post a list of 50 free SEO friendly directories in the next few days. So check back for that.