Virtual Pets Blog

Optimizing Neopets for the search engines
I’ve always wondered why Neopets doesn’t optimize for the search engines but now I know why. It seems that Neopets relies on growing from its user-base by allowing them to refer and receive prizes, however; if Neopets actually paid attention to the search engines, they could double the amount of traffic that they receive - and attract even more members. Neopets relies on its merchandise and tv advertising to help the site grow, however; something that Neopets lacks is on-site optimization for certain keywords.

Let’s take their homepage as an example, its site title says “Welcome to Neopets!”, we already know that we’re at Neopets, but they fail to notice that. Why not a better title like “Neopets - Virtual pet site”, so who all know that its a virtual pet site where you can adopt virtual pets. Also, they use the same description on all pages “Neopets.Com - Virtual Pet Community! Join up for free games, shops, auctions, chat and more!”. We know its a virtual pet community, however; since they’re using the same description on all pages, the search engines don’t care and don’t use it but they use the content on the pages. Neopets is losing its market share to Marapets, however; if they change a few things such as; optimizing its games page by changing its title to something like “Games, Arcade games, flash games - Neopets” as its title, they could possibly rank for games - even though they are ranking on page 3. Its description could also be improved on the games page by replacing its current description with “Neopets has free games, free arcade games, strategy games and more in our games room!”. Neopets needs to improve a great deal if they wish to maintain their current lead as being the biggest virtual pet site on the web today.

Not only does the homepage and arcade games pages need improvement, they also need to open up their profiles to the spiders (improving indexed pages and getting pages crawled) and make each member’s profile contain the following usernamehere - Neopets and state in the meta description usernamehere is currently a member of Neopets.com. Do you want your own profile? Join Neopets.com”. Every single page on Neopets contains the same meta description as well meta keywords - why doesn’t Neopets think the search engines are important? After all isn’t Neopets the biggest virtual pet site? Well if they are (which we know they are) then why don’t they care about the search engines? We’ve tried sending them an email about this, but we’ve never received a response.

If neopets can improve their site for the search engines, they’ll most likely see an increase in traffic and new members - why rely on your fansites to promote and optimize for the search engines when you guys don’t know about the importance of optimizing your website for the search engines? We are a firm believe that Neopets can continue their quest of being the largest and most active virtual pet site - if they try to put an effort in on optimizing for the search engines. They have the largest game room of any pet site, so why don’t they make great use for it - by optimizing it for the keyword “games”, which is searched by thousands of visitors a day. It’ll really boost them by a lot.

So what do you guys think? Does Neopets need to improve for the search engines?