I've set myself an SEO challenge. To get one of my sites into the Google top ten for a major keyword generating one million searches per month. The keyword is D&D, or Dungeons & Dragons to use its full name, the role-playing game produced by Wizards of the Coast

D&D is a favourite among young, mostly male, geeky types, such as myself. It is a game of imagination where the players take the role of characters in a magical fantasy world. Battling dragons and other fantastical creaturesand gaining treasure and power as rewards. Once the domain only of the nerdiest of high school kids, over the last 30 years the game has grown to be a household name.

My interest in tackling this keyword is the promotion of my range of RPG miniatures that can be used with the game. These 28mm metal figures are designed for D&D (though they are just a s suitable for other role playing games). Using figures such as these really enhances the game, especially when they are painted. The act of painting miniatures is an hobby all to itself and thousand of miniatures get painted by hobbiest who will never use them in an actual game.

I'm also expanding into D&D adventures. In the game of Dungeons & Dragons, a Games Master (GM) controls the game and decides the plot of the adventure. Preparing for this can be a time consuming business as maps have to be drawn, monsters need to be created and battles planned. This has given rise to a market for adventures. Prepared scenarios that anyone can pick-up and play with minimal preparation. Whereas the 28mm miniature figures are a physical product, adventures can be reduced to PDFs making them ideal for an online sales.

To generate those sales our D&D site needs a lot of traffic. The sad truth of any online business is that the ratio between visitor numbers to sales is very low. A 1000:1 ratio is exceptionally high for most general stores though in highly specialised niche markets it could be much lower. Most web sites probably operate on a 2000 - 5000:1 ratio. If this sound low, think how often you discover a new web site and then buy something from it. Most of us do it very rarely so getting a large and steady stream of traffic is vital. For 6d6 Fireball, that means keywords linked to Dungeons and Dragons such as adventures and miniatures.

In order to maximise the site's chance of cracking the D&D top 10, the site has gone under a radical redesign. Instead of a very general blog style homepage, it is now a lot more static and heavily focused on the relevant keywords. Without this, incoming links would help me in the search engine but only in unpredictable ways. The redesign also allows better placement of adverts showing off our range of RPG miniatures and adventures. This increases the likelihood of a visitor spending money on the site and unless you convert visitors into sales, SEO is pointless.

The redesign was finished a couple of days ago and already is having an effect. Last week when I checked, 6d6 Fireball was way down in the 500 hundreds for D&D and that was for a specific article about Dungeons and Dragons, not the home page. Yesterday, the home page was around the 300 mark and today it is about 130 in the listings. For the other keywords, I'm already doing well but I forget to check my positions before I did the redesign. As of today, I'm 15th on the RPG miniatures keyword and 4th & 6th on D&D adventures. Importantly both listings feature the right landing page and not either the home page or a random article.

This is a good start for the Dungeons & Dragons SEO adventure. I will report progress soon.

It never ceases to amaze me how many web sites are badly designed, not just for SEO but for usability and graphical impact. Even big, expensive sites make basic errors in commonsense design such as having text overlaid on a graphic making it hard to read. The subject of SEO web site design is very much on my mind as I'm currently working on a new web site, 6d6 Fireball , a role-playing games site. I'm having to deal with all the normal design issues of making a large site site attractive and usable.

On the SEOmoz blog, they have a good article on how good graphical and usability design is as vital for success as designing for SEO:

There are a limited number of variables that search engines can take into account directly, including keyword placement, links and site structure. However, through linking patterns, the engines make a considerable number of assumptions about a given site. Usability and user experience are "second order" influences on search engine ranking success. They provide an indirect, but measurable benefit to a site's external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality. This is also called the "no one likes to link to a crummy site" phenomenon.

SEOmoz has a great round-up of tips for doing SEO on an existing web site.

Let Google Analytics run for two weeks before doing any SEO - This allows analytics to collect data and provides you with a baseline. I recommend you screen capture the relevant pages so you can show your client how your work has positively affected their site.

Evaluate the visual design of your client's site - If the site drives people away, no amount of SEO efforts will help. If the site looks terrible, find well designed sites in your client's niche.

Check compatibility between browsers - Visit your clients site using Mozilla Firefox 2.x and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Safari 3.x. Remember to do this on both a Mac and a PC. You want to make sure your client's website renders correctly and won't drive away users.

"What is Google's strategy? To provide their users with the best, most relevant results to their queries.If your business doesn't align with Google's strategy, then Google doesn't want to help you."

From: essons from the Domain Roundtable.

The message is clear. If you want to optimize your web site, learn to create quality content.