Arcade Admin – The Arcade Owners Ultimate Resource

This guys, is a very old article I did – Over 2 year’s a go. I am publishing it here for you all to read as some of it is still relevant today. The good news is, I will be rewriting it in the coming days, So make sure you look out for it.

What Is Link Building?

This article is building upon my first article on link building which was done a few years ago now, my original ideas and perspectives have changed and I will try to explain why here.

Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to one’s own website or network. This can be done by reciprocal links, direct linking, signature links and social networking link backs. These different methodologies of link building alone are not enough to promote any site, they are required together, and unified link building of the different linking types is the way forward.

The value of links within directories still cannot be devalued but an air of caution has to be shown now towards link building in this way, [submitting sites to directories in the masses].

Link building is one of the best ways to drive certain types of traffic to your site, but only when you link to quality, directly related sites with your own. I am still amazed today that we still see pointless linking between sites that have not relation in terms of content. You will rank better within search engines when you ensure that you have relevant content to the sites that you exchange links with.

There are few types of linking as mentioned above, below is an explanation:-

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal links or link exchanges are the process where two webmasters agree to show the other’s link on their website. After link building when the number of sites which link to a particular site is known as link popularity which helps in the search engine ranking of a website. This is the most common method that we see today, but three way linking has become the norm, due to the Top 3 search engines devaluing reciprocal links between two sites, thus why 3 way linking is a solution.

Direct Linking

This is where you have a site directly link to your site. This is generally a costly move to make depending on how you execute the linking. Methods such as having direct linking from web directories do provide a direct link but do little towards rankings within search engines or traffic. Having direct links from high traffic sites will yield a better result.

Signature Links

One of the new best ways to build up relevant, trafficable links. When using a forum you are able to use your signature post put most anything within it [depending on those forums rules] to being able to use this space to link to your site. This builds up link backs to your site but also allows for keywords population of your link.

Social Networking

The new phenomenon that has grown over the past few years is social networking, highly trafficked but not used by webmaster to their potential. The use of social networking to building links to your site can work in two ways, both in terms of gaining real traffic to your site but also getting picked up by search engines. The use of using real profile linking, groups, applications and blogging within social networking sites can be used to promote your site and create quality links.

Other quality links can be gained from having link backs from .gov, .edu and news organisational sites.

Advantages of link building.

1. Link building can help in getting quality traffic from relevant sites when it done correctly
2 High quality incoming links the site will also be seen as a valuable resource such as edu, gov and news organisation sites.
3. Link building helps in creating awareness, visibility and credibility of your site.
4. The site also obtains wider search engine exposure but this can also lead to being “banned” is done too aggressively.
5. Can create genuine user traffic

Today links have become important for all websites and they are worth the money. In fact, there are several companies dedicated to selling links (as opposed to companies that you can pay to do link building for you). This is a market, in my view, that has seen its day and has become saturated with pointless low-trafficed little PageRanked links. When looking to sell links on your site ensure you do it in a pure manner, meaning direct linking to a site and using quality keywords.

How Do Directories Help?

Within my last articles I had this area dedicated to directories and I still believe we should value web directories, but to an extent. Anyone who is anyone now sees it as a must to have a web directory which has saturated the market which has inevitably led to search engines devaluing these direction links. Its important to point out that directories are not seen as a source of traffic, but more in search engines optimisation of building links to a site.

Web directories are collections of web pages with similar subjects and similar content. These directories help in many ways as they are extremely popular with Internet users as they are considered a source of valuable information, but it has to be pointed out that this trend is changing users are most looking to niche directories to provide them with relevant informative resources.

Listings in directories improve your chances of Google PageRanking as well. If your site is listed in a directory, the search engines are more likely to find it and add it in their listings for free. Also submitting a site on directories helps in getting one way links [direct linking].

There are three kinds of traffic that you can get from the directories where you are listed. The first is click-through traffic, meaning that anyone who ends up on the directory page will be able to see your web site and information, and there is a good chance that they will visit.

The second is indexing your site. Search engines will crawl the web directory, leading them to your site and as a consequence indexing your site. The last way that the directories will increase your traffic, is increasing your ranking on the search engines themselves as they find the volume of links and references to your web site within search engines.

Overall link building is one of the most important steps in building a site; Getting quality links improves your PageRank and espouser to search engines but, more and more towards the end-user [your target audience] . Also the possibility of gaining traffic to your site.

I have seen many do link building to death, over doing it can work in the short term but in the long run it can affect your site. Link building has to be a slow process over time to establish your site and entrench your search engine rankings.

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So guys, What do you think? Any suggestions for what you believe should be in the rewrite?

After having such a good interview with Andy, Owner of Av Arcade, We now have a great interview from Brad, Owner of Arcade Trade Script - Enjoy the interview.

Are you able to give us a short insight into your background?

Sure, I don’t see why not. I started my first website when I was 17 and a senior in high school. It started off as a website to simply show to colleges and later evolved into an arcade. From there I began to teach myself PERL/CGI and PHP to help make my site easier to manage. I no longer dabble in PERL/CGI as PHP is a far more lucrative language. Now I have 5 years of HTML/CSS, 4 years of PHP/MySQL, and 3 years of Javascript/Ajax under my belt.

Currently I am still a student trying to broaden my web and computer knowledge. I am now certified in Website Development as well as Website Support and Maintenance and will soon have 2 more certifications.

What do you do in your spare time?

I have been getting back into Tennis recently. It’s a great sport. I also play a lot of Billiards, Ping Pong, and I bowl a lot. I go to the gym a few times per week too. I’m a pretty average 22 year old when there is no work to be done.

How did the idea of Arcade Trade Script come to you?

I got the idea for traffic trading originally from a client that had me build him a trading system for phpAS v3 about 2 year ago. There was no script for sale at the time that had trading abilities built in and I was getting tired of constantly purchasing new licenses of phpAS, so I figured I would save money making my own arcade system. It was not originally planned to be sold, but while making it people were asking where to get something like what I was building. The market was there with very limited competition, so as soon as ATS was finished I put up the store and began promoting it.

What was your biggest challenge getting Arcade Trade Script to where it is now?

Probably getting the word out. The more people that know, the more that buy, and then the more people telling me their ideas for the future and the more people helping each other out.

Do you own any other script/sites

Yes. I have several. Most sites are arcades. The only arcade not using ATS is Woochoochinchilla.com . That was my first site as mentioned earlier. I also have WordScatter.com which is a new spin on the game Boggle, which effectively turns it into it’s won game.

I have several scripts that I have not been working on for a while, but plan to begin again and release for sale. One of which is being used on some peoples sites and is called “MyEasyAds” and is a on site script to manage and sell ads yourself. This will be my next script to release I am sure.

In the history of ATS which date stands out the most for you?

This is a tough one. It is probably a tie between the first day of the store launching or the day I realized the the plug helper file was taking off.

The first day because on that day it sold a few licenses and completely surprised me. That was very exciting.

The day I realized the helper file took off was really nice too. I had gotten the idea from someone a good while before, but I didn’t think many non ATS sites or big sites would integrate it. I remember going though my trades and auto gathering plugs from them all when I realized I auto gathered successfully from a very large site, that I had never even contacted about integrating it. I even went to their site to make sure I was not seeing things, but the file was there and in working order.

How do you relax at the end of the day?

Well, it depends on how much work there is to do. At the end of some days I get back on my computer and work through the night. Mostly though, I just sit back and watch tv/movie or go out with some friends.

How do you think Google, and the way it indexes site affect the way Arcades operate?

I don’t think it really affects the operation of an arcade, but it can really affect an arcades income, volume of trades (for trading sites), page views per visit. In my opinion the only affect it really has is traffic and quality of traffic.

With the creation of so many different arcades, where do you think the industry will be in 5 years time?

There have been far too many arcades for years now. It is already getting very hard to make a new site take off without a substantial marketing budget. SEO will get even harder and people to pay less for ads on arcades. Most likely more extravagant social arcades will come in and those along with the current leaders will take a good peace of the market. However, the number of people playing online games is increasing every year, so when that happens there will still be plenty of surfers looking for a simple play to play games. This is a niche that will never die out.

What are your top 5 SEO tips for arcade beginners?

First off, never underestimate a little SEO and don’t get your hopes up either. SEO takes a very long time, and if you become impatient you may ruin all your hard work. SEO is always worth it though.

Tips:
1. Always give your games and categories unique descriptions. If you use stock or steal them then you just lost a large percentage of possible free traffic.

2. Do not stuff keywords. By this I mean don’t over use the same work/term and never, ever, ever put text somewhere a user can’t see it unless looking at the source. Google will not count that, and may penalize or ban you.

3. Don’t buy too many links too fast. Let your new site grown on it’s own for a few months and then begin buying links, slowly.

4. Read Googles guidelines to be sure you are not going against them.

5. It’s true that the first paragraph on a page is often the most important, but don’t go over board putting a huge paragraph at the top of your pages or adding a bunch of
< h1 >tags per page. This will not help your SEO much, and will surely drive visitors away. The best thing to do is build your site for your users, not for Google. Then SEO will come from that.

Why does your script stand out from the rest?

Traffic trading of course. ATS also has several other features to make the admins life easier. Such as being able to use up to 3 game icons per game. You can update a game/icon file via upload from the admin panel to avoid FTP. When you delete a game all files are removed from your server. When adding a custom page you can use a file from your server (.html, .php, etc) as that page instead of just coding plain text or HTML into a text box.

It is SEO friendly. You can change the page title of any page set and the meta tags via the admin.

It is easy to template. All templates are standard HTML and PHP files. You can make a theme that looks completely different and even have different features and let your users decide which one they want to use on their computer. If you are making a new theme you can test it live on your site while the rest of the world uses the other theme you have enabled.

ATS wasn’t all about traffic trading. I made it for myself at first, so I needed to add things that others didn’t have that I needed or would like for myself.

Are we going to see any major updates in the coming months?

I am a bit behind on v1.2. There are a lot of things that need to be worked out and still to be added. RSS feeds will be in it as well as some other good features. As for major updates, I am not sure what most people would consider major. It’s likely that at least somethings in v1.2 will be considered as such.

For the Online Gaming industry what do you believe is the greatest challenge going forward?

Coming out with newer and better ideas. Somewhere down the line arcades will need to come up with ideas out side of surfing for and playing games to beat your friends/scores. With the market so saturated now, I am surprised at how little this is happening.

Who is your direct rival in the Arcade Script world

I don’t really have any rivals to be honest. There are some scripts that probably sell more than ATS now like: phpAS, GSS, ArcademPro, but really none of those come with traffic trading which is the main selling point for ATS.

With ATS are you satisfied with where the script is currently?

Yes and no. I like where it is at this time, but I am nowhere near done with it. I have long lists of plans, features, and I know there is too much I have not thought of to be happy with the the current state for long. That’s how I do things. I get it to where I like it, and then I get new ideas and have to change it some more.

What do you believe are the key points to run a successful arcade?

Always check your stats and communicate with partners. Add something that no other or few others have done. Sites with gimmicks can do very well. Make the site easy to use and easy to manage for both you and your users. Don’t over do ads. SEO is not a chore, it’s a side affect of a good site, but there are some things you can do to help it along. Add new games at least 1-2 times per week and make sure to add the newly released ‘hot’ games.

What is the hardest challenge to you, as a developer to keep ATS running?

Being able to sit for hours straight and type until my fingers hurt. It’s not as easy as it looks to sit still for hours. Also the organization of files. I have so many test files around my computers, its hard to keep track and some times I have to code an entire feature.

What, in your view, is key to retaining gamers on an arcade site?

The same keys to running a successful game site as listed above. If your not keeping your users, then you won’t be very successful in the long run.

With the need for competition between gamers become more fierce how do you anticipate changes within ATS to accommodate?

I don’t talk about v2.0 much any more, but that is where I plan to accommodate. v2.0 is and has been planned to turn ATS from ‘user catapult’ to a thriving community arcade script. It will be based all around user features and community and that will be integrated with the trade system also. The hope is to turn ATS into a script that has the option of traffic trading, not just the script to get if you only want to trade.

Thanks Brad for taking time out to answer our questions!