This isn’t actually RW specific, but because I do all my web work in RW, this is my community, so there! Also, this is probably a stupid question, but mostly because I think I already know the answer.
Clearly, I don’t want anyone to have to type in that much text to connect to my site. My solution, I think, is to put my main page in that folder “virtual-escape-games”, and then use the .htaccess file to either redirect or rewrite all codecandyblue.com URLS to the new location inside the folder.
Is that the recommended way? I’m scared to try it for fear of doing the htaccess code wrong and my page going down while I try to figure everything out. So some confirmation or advice would be greatly appreciated! Bonus points for providing the correct text to add to the .htaccess file.
I’m not an SEO expert but I’d disagree with their advise to have a sub page as your main page. Also I’m pretty sure redirects are not looked upon favourably.
Personally I think having the your company name and what it does in the H1 title tag as a better way to highlight what your business does. You can use html line breaks and span tags to separate and style your name and category differently.
Also have a look at Google Pagespeed and run your page through it. Your main page scores poorly on mobile (Google’s preferred metric these days) at 21/100 and not so well on desktop, 67/100. Your page weighs in at a large size and it seems to be the YouTube content loading that really slows things down.
Improving your score will help your SEO but also don’t take it all as gospel.
You can use the longer url if you use a 301 permanent redirect. That said, so little of your traffic is going to come from search engines unless you own your market or pay for search traffic. Social media and word of mouth sill be most of it these days.
Why dont you just get the URL http://virtual-escape-games.com and use this as the main URL? Codecandyvlue will still be your company name, but this way noone else can claim the URL and be a competition for you…
Wow, thanks everyone, for the great advice! RW community definitely is the best community! The original article I read made it seem like they were talking about the home page, but when I went back and looked around, it appears that that advice is just for the sub pages. My problem is that I was trying to have a single page for everything except the store, and have been trying to apply all the SEO advice to that one page. It seems I am better off having a number of pages, with a lightweight home page, and maybe separate pages for each of the games, which puts only one youtube video on any one page, and allows all sorts of descriptive URL’s on the sub pages.
And @Fuellemann, I totally just snagged “virtual-escape-games.com”. Probably not going to use it as my CCB home page, but I would love to create a whole ecosystem around these games, and that would make the perfect companion site! Thanks a ton for that suggestion!!
@Flash, you are the first person I have ever heard suggest that search traffic won’t be a primary source of visitors. I definitely do not own this market. Of course, all the SEO people promise to get everyone on the first page of Google search results and imply that that is the only way to have a successful online business. I wonder if there is a financial motive to that implication
