As some of you know, I've spent the past 2 months optimizing the site's appearance and content for SEO and I've also been optimizing the site's load and render times for faster navigation. These things enhance the site's overall experience but most importantly, these things greatly increase the site's traffic.

I was going through my private messages earlier in the year, and I made great progress, but I had put it on hold for a little while to focus on what I really believed would help this site's traffic.


One of the first things I focused on at around this time was fixing some things on the site that severely needed fixing. This included Fixing all of the NES Games and various features affected by flash being discontinued, such as the Screnshot Uploading.


The 2nd phase included a lot of SEO work. One of the big reasons (and there are many) for the site's traffic drop that I normally don't talk about is the lack of SEO. I wasn't good about staying up to date with good SEO practices. Google changes its algorithms often and 1 moment a site could be following all of Google's best practices, the next moment it could be doing the exact opposite. SEO work is incredibly time consuming and the amount of work that goes into it is usually unappreciated since users want to see me focus my time on things that benefit them in the present rather than what benefits the site in the future. I did a lot of things throughout the site (and still plan to do a few more things) which included updating game pages and updating video game music room. Keep in mind that performing these updates is only half of the time invested, the other half is researching what works best and planning. And then there's the additional time it takes to test out performance impacts on what you did and then alter what you did if the impact wasn't positive or if it was negative. It's very boring work and sometimes requires determination and patience.


The last phase in all of this was optimizing the site. After all of the SEO work I did, the site received a huge increase in bot traffic which caused the site to become very slow. After fixing the primary issue associated with that, I then focused on optimizing the site's code, database queries and just creating new scripts that would make the site run better and faster. All of this resulted into some pages have a speed boost of up to 20% - 50%. This is the kind of work I love doing because the impact is immediate and the users are positively impacted by it. Not only does it benefit the overall user experience but it's also a form of SEO since having a slow site gets you penalized and ranked lower in search engines. Plus, it's fun problem solving and coming up with ideas and creating innovative ways to speed up the site. Win win win.


So now I can finally show you guys that the efforts I put into these things in the past 2+ months paid off:


The top graph shows the Google Analytics traffic boost in the past 30 days. We went from averaging a little over 6000 visitors per a day to a little over 9000 visitors per a day. That's a big increase, and it could potentially increase. The bottom graph shows the site render times in the past 120 days (with that horizontal line represent 0.5 seconds) and it also shows when I did the various things on the site.

Oh my graphs and words I skimmed over!

In all seriousness wouldn’t be easier to have someone who you can really trust to help out with the SEO optimization to give you a bit of slack and more freedom to invest on other projects throughout the site? Just a thought though insignificant. Nonetheless this is quite impressive for the work and effort you put in.

Hopefully this site can get more activity after all this work you put in

I believe I am one of many users on the site who hasn't realized how much work goes on behind the scenes to make the site work faster and better. I remember years ago when I'd get a black page telling me the site was undergoing maintenance. I'd always just move on and not really think about why it would need maintenance. This post really helps explain why the site needs improvements once in a while, and I appreciate your work!

I'm not gonna lie I don't think I fully understand the whole SEO thing but as always I appreciate the work you put into the site it's really cool to see the graph showing how much the work pays off too.

becerra95 : I get the idea behind it but depending on how complicated it is I don't know if anyone would be able to but once again I know nothing about SEO so I don't even know what it entails.

Edit: shout out my brain for not realizing I typed knowing instead of nothing.

becerra95 : It's very hard to find someone with those skills. I've hired a few people here and there in the past but it didn't really help, in fact, a lot of them are from India and they often use gray hat or black hat techniques which actually does more harm than good. If you want to hire a professional however, then that probably does work but it also comes with a price that I can't afford.


Pacman+Mariofan : There's sometimes unexpected maintenance that takes place. Those are annoying because they require me to set aside any plans I had and give me no way to give the users a heads up. Those are rare though. Something to also consider is that in order to cut costs, I had to get rid of a server a while ago. I was able to find ways to improve the site speed enough before getting rid of it that the site ran fine after I downgraded. However, the site traffic is no where near it use to be so if the site really starts to pick up, I can only hope all that I've done lately and in the past year was enough to hand a lot more traffic but if it isn't, then I'd have to consider upgrading to a 2nd server again (which wouldn't be so bad financially since having that big of a site increase means I'd be able to afford it). Now when I say the site is only ran on 1 server at the moment, this does not include the RGR Netplay server, Minecraft server and the RGR file server; I have 2 additional servers for all of that.


SonicOlmstead : There's also the risk of hiring someone who isn't trustworthy. Hiring someone for SEO or development related things usually means I have to give them access to my site files and that can go wrong in so many ways. It's been many years since I've given anyone access to the site files or database. Giving someone access to those things is risky because here's some things they can possibly do:
1. Intentionally ruin the site or delete files
2. Having the files makes it easy to reverse engineer the site and then exploit it
3. Use the files for their own projects or distribute them on the internet
4. Hold my content hostage for a ransom (these things do happen)
5. They can steal sensitive user data in the database
6. Accidentally write bad or delete files
7. Write insecure or faulty code or code with exploits (most coders don't practice good methods for writing code)

There's actually a lot more than just that. It's very very very difficult to trust people on the internet and I know this for a fact because I've unfortunately been the victim to a lot of the things on this list.

Davideo7 : It's unfortunate that people on the internet are like that so much I'll never be able to understand people who go out of their way to harm others or something someone else made like I get why someone would want to hold ransom for data I mean they probably consider it as an easy way for money but it's still just disgusting to me.

SonicOlmstead : There's 2 main reasons why people do these things:
1. To seek revenge in some form
2. To make huge profits (and there's a lot of ways to profit greatly by doing these various things)

And then there's
3. Just an evil human being with too much free time

Oh ok, that makes sense. Yep, surprise maintenance is no fun for you XD