Link building and driving traffic to a website are the life-blood of any successful web endeavor. Web directories work well but I have noticed another effective way a large number of sites have been building links and attracting visitors. This is being accomplished by offering free online games.

Most folks, from your average computer user to your hard-core gamer are looking to kill a bit of time each day relaxing and having fun on the web. If you can get them to come to your site to play card games, racing games or something of the sort then they might just hang around and become a frequent visitor.

Around 2 years ago I noticed tons of arcade sites popping up daily. These were using a low cost script and seemed to be an interesting way to start your own little web business. Around 6 months later the market seemed to be saturated and I saw many of these same sites being sold on webmaster forums. The traffic statistics on these sites appeared to be quite impressive but one common problem I noticed was very low income vs. high traffic. This really stems from the fact that most players of these types of games don’t click on ads, much like webmasters don’t click ads on other webmaster related sites (as directory owners have found out).

My conclusion is that you are better off adding an arcade section to an existing website than having a standalone arcade site because there is simply too much competition.

There has been lots of rumors circulating about “authority” listing in Google — that is when your site comes up in the number one spot for a search with additional page site links.  In this weeks Axandra’s search engine newsletter they published the way to possibly get these.

1.Your website must have a stable #1 ranking for the searched keyword. Other websites don’t seem to get Sitelinks.

2.Your website must be at least 2 years old. It seems that younger websites don’t get Sitelinks.

3.The number of searches and the number of clicks that your website gets for a certain keyword seem to be considered. Keywords that aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks. It also seems that your website has to get many clicks for the searched keyword.

4.The number of links that point to your website with the searched keyword as the anchor text seem to influence the creation of Sitelinks. Sitelinks only seem to appear for the main keywords of a website, not for all keywords for which a website is listed.

Those seem about right.  It would also appear that achieving sitelinks has nothing to do with page rank, as many sites that have zero page rank because of Google penalties still show up with sitelinks.