I did a little research last night and discovered that a search through ‘all’ will pull results from event titles as well as property and other descriptions. This leads to the conclusion that you should make your event titles as descriptive as possible. Of course, being a title, the event will be descriptive anyway, but thinking about the keywords will really help.

So, if you’re running a bingo event, don’t just call it “Gaming at Joe Bobbs”, instead, make sure to put ‘bingo’ in the title, heck, throw in a bit of ‘win money’, or the location name, theme, or whathaveyou. “Goth Bingo – Win Prizes and Money” might be a much more attractive and findable title for your event!

Today I’m bringing Second Life business owners another little optimization tip to increase visitors. If you’re running a shop in Second Life, you might want to look at creatively adding some of the frequent misspellings of popular keywords to your site descriptions. You would probably want to hide these at the bottom of a profile, but they might just do the trick for you.

Clothes shops could consider dreses along with dresses, lingere along with lingerie, and so on. Think about your products and shop and think about the most common kinds of misspellings. Of course, you don’t want to overdo it and have a profile stuffed with random words, but if you have a particularly badly misspelled name or product type you should definitely think about it.

I hope this little series of optimizatin ideas proves useful to you. Let me know if you notice any results!

Linden Lab recently introduced a Sponsored Links program in Second Life. This interesting idea sees people bid on eBay for a chance to have one of 20 slots on the Sponsored Links section on the in-game ‘find’ menu and, for some, on the web site as well.

While an interesting idea, I’m somewhat concerned at its implementation. For starters, by listing individual slots the final sale prices are varying between around $13 and $40. On average slots are going for $20-30. The wide variance in cost for a slot means ROI for the businesses involved (can they be considered hobbies any more at this point?) must be considered quite unpredictable. Its also a time-consuming task as you micro-manage your budget and try and maintain leadership in at least one bid race. All this on the back of no data from Linden Lab on views for the ads, click-throughs from the web site or any case studies of success the ads can generate whatsoever. It’s a risky investment for no proven return, yet it seems popular enough.

Also of concern is that the price you pay for your ad in no way influences your position on the sponsored link list. You would expect that the slot that sold for most would give the buyer a first position on the list, with the lowest winning bid being last. But no, instead, the list is sorted alphabetically. At the top, “* Animations and poses”, and at the bottom, “Timeless Trinkets”. It would seem only fair that those who pay the most go to the top, not those who know the priority sorting of asci characters. The last thing we need is a bunch of “### AAA Great Place” type listings.

For a toe-in-the-water experiment the sponsored links are an interesting move by Linden Lab, representing an official acknowledgement of the economic closeness between real and Second Life. However, I think they should try and refine the scheme as quickly as possible. I, for one, would be interested in numbers for the views and clickthroughs before I considered an investment. For a cost of $30 (around $7,500Lindens), I would need to be fairly sure it was going to be profitable and right now it’s not clear at all how beneficial the purchase will be.

Hamlet nominates Game SLave as link of the week!

Yesterday I was searching for Metadverse, the ad network being built in Second Life by Rather Underthorn. But I couldn’t find it. An average searcher might have given up there, but instead I persevered and a did a search, discovering I had actually spelt the name wrong. The correct spelling was Metaadverse, and so I was able to find the location and organizer. What does this teach us? Yes, Rathe needs to put somewhere in his Metaadverse description a miss-spelling of his company’s name. I imagine many others are capable of making a similar mistake, and putting the common misspelling in his land description will ensure interested people still find his shop.

If you own a property with an unusual name or a hard-to-spell name you might want to think about adding in the odd misspelling to your property or personal profiles. The DarkLife project suffers from a misspelling problem, in that people often refer to it as Dark Life. Thus I have tried to make sure both types of spellings are used in various places.

Hope you enjoy today’s tip. I’ll bring you one more at the end of the week!

Lo Jacobs had some excellent optimization tips on the forum, pointing out a couple of things I overlooked. I will quote her post in full, as it’s full of good idea.

They are good tips, but I must make one correction here; if you write “dresses” in your store description it WILL show up in Find if someone types “dress”. I’ve done it myself.

Also, not to nitpick but there IS limited space. They’re great tips and I try to make my store descriptions as accessible as possible (utilizing much the same logic as yours) but when you’ve got makeup AND shoes AND pants AND dresses AND skins AND shirts, not to mention formal wear, lingerie, and men’s clothes, and possibly hats and animations and hair (not that I have all that stuff) — you have to decide what you want to put in.

Another thing is, you still want to make the description appealing, throw in a little advertising, which also takes up space.

So it’s a little tough to do sometimes especially when you’ve got a huge variety of things to sell.

Second Life suffers from a problem. The problem is it’s a lot more like real life than the web, and like real life, stuff is hard to find. What do I mean by this? Well, when you’re surfing the web you can easily find just about anything you want in moments, thanks to the wonder that is Google. I remember in the bad old days before search engines, you generally followed links from other people to interesting content. Now it’s all available at the tap of a ‘search’ button.

In real life, things aren’t so easy. If I’m looking for a store I have to dig through the yellow pages or pound the streets. Second Life is much the same. The virtual streets are there to be walked and a player can easily wander and browse for hours. We have a version of the yellow pages in ‘find’, but how often does it show you what you want? In my experience, not often. This means shops are making less money than they could and residents aren’t able to find what they are looking for.

For example, do a search for ‘games’ or ‘game’ and you get a limited list almost entirely populated by casino games. Searching for games in Second Life you would never realize there are first person shooters, a
Space Invaders game and even a fishing game! What does this mean for Second Life? It can only mean one thing, Second Life’s content, to the average user, will seem bland as the search results from a ‘find’ simply don’t produce any useful information unless you know exactly what you want to find.

How can we fix this? Well, there are two things to be done. The first can be done by every player and will not only drive business to your locations and increase your profit, but will make the game easier to use. What you need to do is search optimize your property descriptions, your profiles, and anything else that can pop out of a ‘find’ search in Second Life.

What does this mean? Well, it means if you run a clothing store, don’t just name it “Bobs Fashion” and write no more in the description box, it means think carefully about the keywords you could use to attract customers. How about writing in:

“Bobs Fashion – custom designer clothes, skirts, dresses, hats, shirts and accessories. For all your shopping needs”

See what I’ve done? I’ve populated the shop description with many useful words that players search for in find. Look at how many great keywords I have hit up! To make it easy, I made them bold for you all. This means all those searches for clothes that players were doing that once never showed up Bob’s Fashions, now have a good chance of displaying Bob’s Fashions right in front of an interested buyer’s eyes.

The smart among you will notice some problem with my keywords. They’re all in plural form. A search for ‘buy dress’ won’t turn up Bob’s Fashions. If you really wanted to optimize your site or personal description you could consider adding another paragraph, perhaps along the lines of

“The best dress and skirt shop in town. Find a blouse or shirt to fit you today and the matching hat and shoes”

In that description I have included the singular form of all the keywords to further increase the keyword coverage of Bob’s Fashions. This should be something everyone considers in addition to their standard keyword strategy.

See how now and player search for dress, dresses, shopping, shop, etc etc has a good chance of pulling up Bob’s Fashions. Suddenly Bob goes from zero visibility on ‘find’ to great visibility. And as in real life, there are proven results from this effort in Second Life. With this search optimization technique I have helped a couple of friends see a definite increase in traffic, and now I offer it to you, for free. I invite you to try it out and tell me how it works out for you. I’m happy to be contacted for advice as well. Later this week I will bring you another tip, courtesy of my experiences at my employment, Netconcepts, a web design and search optimization company.

But we haven’t got to what Linden Labs can do. Well, first I think they should acknowledge that there is a problem connecting users to the content they wish to enjoy because it’s so hard to find what you’re looking for. Working to improve their ‘find’ system would help a lot, but that is likely to be long and arduous work. Partnering with Google would be even better, imagine if a Google search turned up a Second Life shop, complete with link! Ok, unlikely I know, but fun to imagine.
While Googling Second Life would be great it’s unrealistic. What could be done is to implement something like Google Directory, and let players specify which of several categories their properties fall into. A location could be set as a casino, club, adult, store (clothes), store (other), game, and so on. This could be used both as a way for players to search, and as a filter to impose on any ‘find’ a player undertook. Search for games and filter out casinos. Search for shoes, and only search ‘adult’ to find those bitch-heels you’ve always wanted. The power to find what players want could be simply and easily put back into the hands of the player.

I invite the Lindens to rise to the challenge, and I invite players to work to make their properties more search friendly, for everyone’s benefit.

Game SLave, my new games database for Second Life is ready to go! You can go and read about all the different games in Second Life as well as contribute by adding pages to the site, editing pages and updating information. The site is a wiki, which means that the content is created and maintained entirely by its users. I hope this will make it easy to keep the database up to date and accurate in the quickly changing ‘verse of Second Life.