Thoughts about Dev.Mag

hermantulleken

Hey Everyone,

Dev.Mag only published two articles in the last year, but it's still getting consistent traffic that is not bad (roughly ~1500 page views per day).


(The step up up you see was caused by publishing 3 very popular articles in a row. Together, they changed traffic permanently. The very big peak was when one article got into "main stream dev" circles.)

By choice and by historic accident, we did not publish any game dev news, nor any locally specific stuff since 2011 (In the old days Dev.Mag used to do both). The consequence is that our "audience" is very international, (quite slanted to the US), and it was not totally terrible when we effectively stopped publishing (the content on there had a timeless quality that kept people coming in).

So I have been thinking if it's a good idea to build the magazine (:P) up again, and if it can benefit MakeGamesSA, especially since the community is now much bigger. Of course, now there are many other good (better) places to publish (Gamasutra, Alt.Dev blog), and important news are of course already handled by news sites. And as @Karuji can confirm, it also takes a quite heavy amount of work to get the articles up to the quality that we have been delivering (editing [and sometimes considerable amounts of rewriting :P], checking resources and facts, finding examples, making and processing graphics).

Any thoughts?

dammit

I might be ahead of myself here, but my immediate thoughts:

Short: This would be an amazing collaboration.

Medium: This would be a really great mutually beneficial collaboration.

Long: When I started looking into the SEO stuff for MGSA (something that is somewhat of an ongoing endeavour that got side-tracked by Christmas and jams and whatnot), I found that the solutions to MGSA's low ranking and poor authority as a site (not content or people, just search wise) could mostly be solved by having a blog of some description. Of course, as you've pointed out, doing this - and doing it well - is really freakin' time consuming! It's not something anyone I knew wanted to volunteered to run and so I didn't see it happening.

However, a collaboration between an already well supported and authoritative online magazine would be a huge boost to MGSA's online reputation and drive a whole lot more people to the forums and get some attention for our local devs. Of course, many of the devs who currently volunteer to do talks for the meetups should also then be encouraged to help add awesome content to dev.mag to keep the love flowing.

PS: I should probably mention that I've always thought dev.mag was awesome and I'm not at all surprised to see that you have a constant stream of visitors even when you don't publish regularly. I would love to get hold of the analytics and see what search terms are most commonly bringing people to the site...

Karuji

@dammit can't really give you access from my account, but I can give you some stat dumps top is Google analytics, and bottom Jetpack.

tbulford

@hermantulleken I think it would be a great idea. Assuming its not going to take up too much time. Also why not get guest writers, from the community here. It's often rewarding doing the research and polish on a topic you know, only to discover a whole set of details you previously misunderstood.

@dammit with regards to the SEO from what I understand of Google's approach links to your site and the words around those links are considered far more then your own sites words. That's one of the reasons we have a link to MGSA from our web page. Even if each link doesn't bring a lot of traffic it will help lift the SEO status.

So to combine the powers of both statements ;)

if guest authors were from the MGSA community we could keep our BIO's on MGSA and link to them at the bottom of each article. All the words of that article would then balance in against that link creating the ultimate take over the internet search engine optimization and allow us to finally TAKE OVER THE WORLD (last part should be read in Brain's voice)

dammit

tbulford said:

@dammit with regards to the SEO from what I understand of Google's approach links to your site and the words around those links are considered far more then your own sites words. That's one of the reasons we have a link to MGSA from our web page. Even if each link doesn't bring a lot of traffic it will help lift the SEO status.

So to combine the powers of both statements ;)

if guest authors were from the MGSA community we could keep our BIO's on MGSA and link to them at the bottom of each article. All the words of that article would then balance in against that link creating the ultimate take over the internet search engine optimization and allow us to finally TAKE OVER THE WORLD (last part should be read in Brain's voice)

SEO is a lot about content too, not just about links. Having a blog connected to your page means you have information that is updated regularly, that is easily shareable and that can get social votes. It's also much more "authoritative" than a forum.

Regular blog/mag posts bring in traffic regularly and - as you can see from the search list - from a wide search terms that you wouldn't necessarily be able to account for on a much smaller site (like MGSA).

And while links to MGSA are really important (yay, thank you for adding it to your site), having articles that regularly link to the site would be good too, because you can put them in the author's bio and in the article and chosen keyphrases.

note: Links can be bad if they're not bringing in traffic, and if you are linking back to them as well it almost cancels the whole deal out. If you get a link from an authoritative site (based on your alexa ranking) that's waaay better than getting one from a brand-new-I-just-started-yesterday blog for example. Not all links are equal :)

tbulford

@dammit got a little lost working out your position on the suggestion. Seams you agree?

dammit

tbulford said:

@dammit got a little lost working out your position on the suggestion. Seams you agree?

I don't agree on your first statement about SEO :)

tbulford

You don't think linking from the gamedev articles to the authors bios in MGSA will be positive then?

dammit

It's this that I don't agree with:

tbulford said:

@dammit with regards to the SEO from what I understand of Google's approach links to your site and the words around those links are considered far more then your own sites words.

hermantulleken

Thanks for the feedback so far.

@dammit I will hook you up with Dev.Mag's analytics if you want to poke around.

Some extra info.

Search ranking aside, a link's click through rate drops like a stone down a black hole the lower it is on a page. A link in the first paragraph may get about 15 clicks from / 300 views, and then exponentially lower (this is of course a non-scientific average) that does not take relevance into account. The link in my bio is clicked maybe 2/3 hits a day (from roughly 500 or so page views that is on).

Anyways, you will get to see that in analytics in much more detail.

dammit

Please don't give me access - Analytics is like crack :P But your breakdown is particularly interesting :) Going to mull over things over the next week.

hermantulleken

@dammit Yes it's true! Anyways, just let me know if you'd ever want to see it.

(Sorry my replies are a bit rushed; been running around like mad demon all day and then it was GGJ.) I will respond a bit better later; hopefully others will way in as well.