IGN

When this company contacted SEO Inc (A Digital Marketing Agency), the most advanced SEO company, in the summer of 2003, the site was established and well-known in the gaming community. The site also had good search engine rankings and got approximately 2.5 million unique monthly visitors. At the time, IGN used proprietary in-house content management and a team of content writers. The pages generated when new game reviews and information were added to the site were poorly optimized. In addition, severe architectural issues with the site prevented search engine spiders from crawling thoroughly and consistently.

IGN’s goals were to “Dominate the search rankings for keywords related to any video games and gaming systems reviewed on the site.” IGN wanted to rank high in search engines, and most specifically, Google for any game titles and variants of those game titles’ phrases. IGN’s revenue is generated from advertising sales, so more traffic leads to more inventory for ad sales, more ads being sold, and, therefore, more revenue. To create more traffic, IGN knew that it needed to be much more visible when people used the search engines.

After several conversations with the IGN team, we created a customized optimization package designed to achieve their ranking goals and fit their budget. Because IGN.com had architectural problems and a proprietary CMS (content management system), it was decided that SEO Inc. would work with their I.T. and web development team at their location to do the SEO consultation.

As IGN.com’s SEO consultant, this would allow us to send our SEO team to their location for several days to learn how their system worked and partner with IGN’s in-house programmers to improve the system and complete the optimization. In addition, we created customized SEO best practices and architected these into their proprietary CMS. We also trained their content writers and page developers on SEO content best practices, which are still in place today. When new games and pages are added to the site, they are typically ranked within weeks, if not days.