Search Engine Optimizing
From VbGORE Visual Basic Online RPG Engine
Creating a good game is the most important part - there is no subsitution for content. But letting people know about the game can be a hard process.
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[edit] Before You Start Advertising
Before you start to advertise your game all over the place in an attempt to get a big group of players, you want to make sure you have something to show. You never want to promote an "in progress" game where you have nothing but ideas. Even just having screenshots and a "download coming soon" can be bad. Although it is nice to start getting players interested, most won't stick around. Worse yet, they will remember that nothing interesting was on the site when they last visited, so they most likely won't return. You can tell friends about your game, but leave the public advertising for when the game is ready to handle the people - promoting too early will only harm your progress.
[edit] Game Websites and Directories
The best place to start is websites like MPOGD where they will host a link to and a short description of your game. This is the easiest way to start getting a bunch of hits to your site.
[edit] Gaming Forums
The next best place to go is game forums and look for an appropriate place to advertise. This is a great way to throw out a link and get feedback in the process. You really want to take the comments you get into consideration (unless it is just random flaming) because they come from the crowd you are trying to attract. If someone says that your site loads too slowly, then remove some of the crap. Don't just think "Oh, well I have a super awesome hella phatty computer/internet so I'm fine" and ignore it.
[edit] Affiliate Links
Find people who are either interested in your game or have a related type of website and see if they will exchange links with you - you place a link to their site on yours, and they place theirs on yours. There is never any harm in asking.
[edit] Backlinks / Keywords / SEO
With enough backlinks to your site and SEO (search engine optimization), you are bound to shoot up in the rankings of search engines. With game sites, this can be pretty hard, since it is a very popular topic. To get yourself in even the top 10 of "Free online game" or "free mmorpg" will be an amazing feat in itself. You want to try and make things a bit more specific, like make note that your game is made in Visual Basic. Try to casually throw in as many related keywords as you can, too: VB, VB6, Visual Basic... As for keywords, the best place to put your important keywords is in your URL, page names, page titles and main page. Just don't spam with irrelevant keywords or needlessly with relevant keywords.
[edit] Site Content
Like said above, you want to contentrate on your keywords relivant to the site and place appropriately. Search engines have no way of crawling images/flash for text, so all your text must be done in ascii characters. Think of it this way - if you can see the text in the HTML, the crawler can probably see it, too. It never hurts to extend on your features, too. Use your imagination - if you are hosting an online game, what else can you host that is related to that? Guides on how to make games possibly? Programming? Art guides? Useful information will end up being linked by people who find it helpful which will give you more backlinks and people going to your site, while it will also give you a wider selection in search engines.
[edit] The Site Itself
The most important thing of a website is the website itself. Look at the MASM website for example:
Horribly ugly and dull. Though you do not want to make it too complex like the Wowcraft site:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml;jsessionid=2381656A853373B71478988F0383914B.app04
It is often hard to pull off something like that. I guess it can be okay for Wowcraft since it is aimed towards people with decent computers/internet in the first place, but it even takes a bit for it to load on my cable internet and runs VERY poorly on my 600mhz processor. There are thousands of templates out there you can use, like this site, which uses phpNuke.
[edit] Robots.txt
The Robots.txt is a file you place in your root directory (ex: http://www.vbgore.com/robots.txt) that gives rules to search engine crawlers on what they can and can not crawl. By default (having no robots.txt), you allow them to crawl every page. The problem with this is that they can waste time crawling unimportant pages and never make it to your important ones. People usually use Robots.txt for Google since Google Pagerank technology applies a page rank to every page in your site and averages it out for your overall site's page rank. If you have very weak-in-content pages (login pages for example) being crawled, it can lower your overall page rank. One page wont make much of a difference, but a few hundred and even thousand can easily. It is also good to use to block the crawler from looking at and indexing your admins-only pages or private info. This does not in any means, though, prevent people from accessing these pages. Finally, you can block certain crawlers (useful if you are on limited bandwidth) completely from your site.
More information on creating your Robots.txt file can be found here.
[edit] Creating A Site Map
Last but not least... well, probably is least. Sitemaps, although they are helpful, are not as helpful as you would hope. Basically, a sitemap is a map of all the pages in your website that search engines use to crawl your site. It will never hurt, but just don't hope for too much from this. Sitemaps are especially important on websites with big articles on them - it would really suck to not get that article crawled just because all of your other minor pages took up the crawler's time. The best sitemap creator I have found is GSiteCrawler - a standalone Visual Basic (wooo!) program. It is not the fastest, but definitely efficient. It will start from all the pages you specify (on a properly made site, you should only have to specify your home page) and crawl those and gather the links on those pages, then branch out and crawl the ones gathered, and keep spreading the web out farther until all linked pages have been indexed. From here, you just export the database to a sitemap file and upload it to Google, and any other search engines you want.
[edit] Google's Sandbox
The "sandbox" algorithm is something that some of those who study the art of SEO deny, but the majority say it exists in at least some form. The point, whether it exists or not, does not change the fact that it does happen. How the sandbox works is you are thrown into it when something significant about your hosting changes, whether you change hosts or get a completely new domain. Google can see the "behind the scenes" details and does not just look at your website URL. What sandboxing does is it lowers your position way down to the end of the results of a search query - way lower then you would normally be.
Now before you go on saying how absolutely stupid this is, look at it from the side of Google and searchers. A few years ago, those who knew a lot about SEO could pull all the dirtiest tricks to get their page to the top of the results, then either throw out a ton of ads, spyware, adware, or rub their product in your face and hope you buy it. These sites would get banned, but they would just pop up again. Google's fast indexing made them a victim to this more than any other search engine - a new site could be up there and screwing up the results in a matter of weeks. Google uses the sandbox to help filter out those "bad seeds". Do you really want to keep a site around for a few months just to have a few days of jackassism?
Sandboxing can last a few months to almost a year. What determines how long it lasts hasn't been fully determined, but many say that the number of backlinks you have, the size/content of your website, and what kind of site it is (ie uncommon categories like Spoons would get indexed faster, while Get Rich Quick schemes would get indexed a lot slower).
But remember, it doesn't matter how many people find your site - if you do not have a good enough game that is far enough in development, no one will stick around.
