Advertised at University

Advertised at University

C. Senkbeil (guest) 07 Feb 2012 04:37

Just letting you know that I publicized your website several times during the game project meetings at my university. We've got roughly thirty members, most of which were extremely interested in C# and XNA for game development and found your website the most helpful by far. It's refreshing to see a website that has tutorials focusing on a wide range of XNA content, something that many other websites have not done. Furthermore, your tutorials are focusing on XNA 4 and provide solutions with Visual Studio 2010, which is extremely nice to see considering how many other tutorials are outdated with XNA 3 and Visual Studio 2008. As a fellow game enthusiast and the current president of the gaming project at my university, I have to thank you for taking the vast amount of time needed to build this website and populate it with so many XNA tutorials! It's a real treasure and I'm honestly surprised it isn't the first link returned by search engines (similar to NeHe for OpenGL).

I'm looking forward to hearing more about that book you mentioned, too.

Re: Advertised at University

rbwhitaker 07 Feb 2012 06:29

What you've done is honestly one of the best ways anyone can thank me for the work I've done with this: spread the word! Thanks for telling others about it!

You're analysis is basically what I've seen as well. It seems like all of the other sites out there either (a) only have a tiny handful of tutorials, or (b) have a wider variety, but it is all out-of-date. I wish I could talk Google into pushing my site up even higher in the rankings (though, admittedly, depending on what you're searching for, I show up at the top for some specific searches) but I know they've got to let the search engine magic do its job.

Thanks again for advertising me to other students around you!

Re: Advertised at University

ff8jake 09 Feb 2012 05:17

Hi RB,

As far as search engine results go I think Wikidot is holding you back. If you were to port the content over to its own site (or subsection of your Starbound site) you could then check out Google's Webmaster tools and submit a sitemap, and monitor what search terms people are using to get to your tutorials. Once you have that info some well placed h1's with search terms as well as search terms scattered around the topic can make a massive difference. Considering the XNA tutorial scene seems to be pretty sparse, you could probably spearhead the #1 spot with a bit of optimization. I would definitely do some Googling for Google SEO optimizations (most notably using mod_rewrite or other URL rewriting to make dynamic pages appear to be static HTML).

Not complaining, just feel sorry for everyone missing this site. I was amazed at how well it got me into C# when I accidentally stumbled upon it.

Re: Advertised at University

rbwhitaker 09 Feb 2012 05:23

That's the plan, Jake! That's the plan!