SEO For Roleplaying

A long time ago when I started blogging about roleplaying, I had what I thought was a huge dilemma on my hands. I was trying to choose a name for my roleplaying blog, but I ran into a stumbling block. How do you spell the word roleplaying? The problem is, you can spell or abbreviate the word roleplaying in a variety of different ways: roleplaying, role playing, role-playing, or abbreviated as RPG (role playing game). Each way of spelling the word is correct in its own right, but for the purposes of choosing a blog name and providing consistency throughout the blog I wanted to spell it, tag it, and promote it all the same way.

In the beginning, I did a lot of keyword research online using Google and Yahoo. One of the interesting things I quickly discovered was that most of the search engines preferred to separate the word into ‘role playing’. This typically refers to the actual, physical act of role playing, which can be non-game related. The single word, roleplaying, seemed to be the preferred method for pen and paper roleplaying game publishers to spell the word. This wasn’t 100% consistent though as I discovered different ways of spelling the word being used by different publishers.

The abbreviation of RPG was by far the most common way to spell the word as far as search engines were concerned. I believe this is due to two factors. One, RPG can be an abbreviation for many things, such as role playing games or rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Two, there are many video games use the term RPG to describe what type of game they are. For example, the Final Fantasy series is often referred to as an RPG video game.

One of the things that I didn’t learn in the beginning was how big of a deal this choice would be for my website in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If I wanted to talk about the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game’, I would get different search engine results if I was constantly referring to it as the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Role Playing Game’. It doesn’t seem like adding that space would make a big difference, but it does. One of those searches gets about one hundred times more traffic than the other in Google (I’ll let you guess which).

In the end, I chose to spell the word as one, non-hyphenated word, roleplaying. There were two reasons why I chose to use this version over other versions. First, most major roleplaying games spell it in this way. For example, Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf Publishing consistently spell it in this way in their game books and on their websites. Secondly, if you do a search using Google, Yahoo, or any other major search engine, on the single, non-hyphenated word, roleplaying, you will come up with primarily pen and paper roleplaying games. Even though I wanted to talk about video games, computers games, and more, my primary focus was on pen and paper roleplaying games. I’ve found that when discussing pen and paper roleplaying games online, “Roleplaying” is the way to go.

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