Neopets is a poorly-designed SEO site
Neopets has been around for years but it lacks SEO (search engine optimization) and they’re losing their rankings on all the major search engines. Why is this? Well, because Neopets’ site descriptions are on all pages and they don’t use unique keywords, unique titles nor unique descriptions on all their games. Take the “arcade” games page as an example. It says “Neopets - Online games”, but it would be better off saying “Online games - Neopets”, so they can try to rank for Games as well. Their description is the basic description that they use on all site-pages, but they should try making it say “Games, play games on Neopets.com for free with over 5,000 arcade games to chose from and interact with other games players”. If they changed it to something like that - they could possibly become the leader once again on the search engines and possibly overtake Marapets for a few keywords.
Why should Neopets rank higher on the search engines? Well, new users are always searching for “games” on google as well as “virtual pets” and if Neopets ranks higher, then they’ll become even bigger. I’m sure most of their promotion now comes form their network ads (on Nick and such) and their offline merchandise which Marapets doesn’t sell yet.
What else can Neopets do to improve their search engine rankings? Well, possibly a better referral system with more prizes since it is old and outdated. They have a ton of flash games so they shouldn’t have a problem ranking for “games”, but they do need to optimize the site better.