The focus of my SEO activities of recent months has been two sites, one focused on role-playing games. The other Herge's Tintin and the new film that is being made of his adventures.

The role-playing games site is on the surface a blog about role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. A lot of the work on this has gone into building a good relationship with other bloggers through comments and communal activity. This has been successful and generated us a page rank of 3 and a steady supply of traffic from search engines and links. However the real focus of the site is Fantasy Miniatures.

One side of playing tabletop RPGs is the use of pewter miniatures to mark out movement and combat. Collecting and painting these miniatures is a hobby all by itself and there is a large overlap between the world of wargaming miniatures and fantasy miniatures. Targeting miniature related keywords has been harder. There are a large number of suppliers on the web and many have been activate for several years. This has given them a solid base of links and PR that will be hard to shift.

As an SEO side project I have been helping a friend launch his own RPG site. This is not a blog but a site for software that helps players run their game. The first tool is a free monster generator for D&D. This has been a lot simpler SEO project as though there have been lots of generators and tools in the past, none have ever developed a strong position in the search engines. In just a couple of weeks of launch, the site was number one in Google for our primary, each-to-reach target but had also scrapped into the top ten of the our long-term target keywords.

This just shows that SEO is an unpredictable business and rapid gains can be made with planning, a lot work and a bit of luck.

My site about Tintin has done very well in attracting visitors. I was quick off the mark in creating the site after the film was announced, allowing me to grab a good Tintin Movie related domain. (Just a side note, if you are going to create a site about a film, then always include the word 'movie' in your domain name rather than the world 'film' as it is substantially more often used in searches). I've been number one on my initial keywords practically since the site was created and I'm now the authoritative site on the subject.

As well as a steady flow of traffic from the search engines, I have seen large spikes in traffic whenever there is an announcement. When it was revealed that Jamie Bell would be playing Tintin I saw a quadrupling of my traffic for the next couple of days. This gives a taste of what will happen when the film opens.