I got World of Warcraft for my Birthday.

And you want to learn how to play World of Warcraft? Well WoW is much more complicated than it first appears and you can waste a lot of time and money in wandering about without a clue. Blizzard have drastically improved the in-game help over the years but their on-line advice still remains very, very basic.

I became aware of this lack of information very quickly and realised that there would be lots of advice on-line, which of course there is, but there wasn't a simple comprehensive guide for new World of Warcraft players to learn the game. So, I thought I would fill the void and have produced an easy to follow guide which also points you to other very useful websites. Just pop along to Learn to Play World of Warcraft.

When you are there please could you tell all your friends about the book by using the Facebook, Twitter and other links. It will increase the book's popularity tremendously and I will be very grateful.

Google, Google, Google!

Why do they make it so damn hard for us new website owners to get noticed?!  Have good content they say... I have.  Write articles and press releases we are told... I have written numerous.  Use linking phrases in your articles we are told... so I do.  Use linking phrases for the terms you want to be searched for... so I do! But now we are told we cannot use the same linking phrases because they will be considered spam.

This is the point at which I started hysterically screaming and cursing.  The big boys do not have to jump through the numerous hoops that the little guys do and their sites are guaranteed constant exposure.  Of course they advertise on Google which helps, but they do not need to do this because their brand name is all they need.

If you have read my previous blogs you will know I have been attempting for a while to get my site noticed and reap the rewards with thousands of hits.  Blizzard will be releasing an expansion to World of Warcraft very soon and it is unashamedly targeted at the Chinese market.  I would like to be very visible for this launch but I really don't know what more Google want from me.

Most of the sites I am competing against do not market the brand new player niche and many of the guides that are written have very poor content.  Indeed some of the sites are appalling and the content is threadbare, yet I cannot compete for the term "World of Warcraft Guide" or even "New to World of Warcraft".  The latter is the name of my website, so you would have thought that it would be a fairly simple process to rank on the first page for it, but the last time I searched I could find no trace of my site!  As I said in a previous blog, these two terms are the only ones that have significant traffic for my niche so it is imperative that I rank highly for them.  However "world of warcraft guide" is so damn generic I have no chance whatsoever of ever being able to rank for it, and the term is not very useful anyway because most of the traffic will not be new players.  

According to the Google keyword tool my previously favoured search terms "new world of warcraft player guide" and "world of warcraft beginners guide" do not get searched for.  To be frank I cannot believe people do not refine their searches to try to find what they are looking for.  I know I do and surely I am not unique?!

Anyway back to Google's decision to penalise websites for spamming the same linking phrases.  What I want Google to tell me is what the damn difference it makes?  How is it any less spammy to use "world of warcraft guide for beginners" than "world of warcraft beginners guide"?  The point I am making is; how the hell do I get the right exposure and traffic for my hard work without getting penalised?  I feel Google are unfairly restraining my right to "trade" and are creating barriers to entry into the market place.  Apart from Google's obvious domination of the search engines, and hence the Internet, what legal right do they have to restrain trade the way they do?

I know we do not want the Internet to be dominated by useless affiliate advertising only websites and that quality should be the objective of all website developers, but I seriously wonder whether it is right that Google alone should decide.  I would like to see a bit of democracy in action and I'm not talking about democratic capitalism, because money is not the webs raison d'etre.

So it has to be World of Warcraft Guide!

Oh well back to the drawing board... I decided to have a look at the Google Keyword Tool and duly entered the keyword phrases I told you I was targeting in my last post.  Well according to the tool my searches do not register at all, so it seems it is pointless to be top of Google for the phrases I am using, because no one actually enters them into Google :-(  Apparently the phrase people enter 823,000 times globally per month is "World of Warcraft guide".  I would have thought that this term is far too generic for a new World of Warcraft player to actually find a guide tailored to their needs?   Actually it is far too broad, which is why I thought my phrases were more likely to attract the right people to my website.  It seems however that Google shows people are not that logical in the way they use the search engine.  So it appears these linking keywords to my site will be my best bet: -


New to World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft guide

Well I hope this will soon come to fruition and I find myself on the first page for these phrases and get a share of the 823,000 monthly visitors :-)

My New Wordpress Blog

Can be found at: New to World of Warcraft Blog

I have started this up solely because of the need to have fresh regular content on my website.  Google Blog is great but it is not entwined within the actual web structure of my site and therefore it is not recognised by the bots as part and parcel of the New to World of Warcraft website.  I am hoping a Wordpress blog will increase the SEO value of my site and improve its page ranking.

Is Blizzard's World of Warcraft Cash Cow in Decline?

Players are, some would say at long last, becoming cheesed off with Blizzard constantly milking them for more money, and it comes at a time when World of Warcraft has been losing large numbers of customers.  Blizzard are facing more and more competition and in harsh economic times people will look to spend their hard earned pennies more frugally.

World of Warcraft's monthly subscription must be the company's biggest income generator by a huge margin and it would seem sensible to start listening to the customers before more people vote with their feet.  One of my biggest gripes with the game is that it is a constant grind to achieve anything.  Why should it be the case that my PvP gear is not good enough for Dungeon raiding at higher levels? And why should people who like PvE Raiding not be able to use the same gear for venturing into World of Warcraft Battlegrounds?

I know the answers already, they were rhetorical, but it's making the point again that Blizzard are far too deliberate in their efforts to maintain those monthly subscriptions.  Blizzard need to concentrate on putting "having fun playing" at the top of their agenda.  I would love to try out a dungeon or two (masochistic tendencies you see ;-) but I'm too busy trying to get the gear so I can compete on a level playing field in Arenas.  By the time I accomplish that we will already be into a new season and I will need to get the new gear so I can...

The point being I haven't got the time to get both sets of gear necessary to enjoy the different aspects of the game, solely because Blizzard keep moving the goal posts so I will spend money to keep on the treadmill.  What Blizzard should be doing instead is creating more real content and tweaking the current content.  For example some of the Battlegrounds are nothing more than PvE rushes rather than PvP competitions.  Now we all know Blizzard are good at producing RTS games and it cannot be beyond them to develop PvP along similar lines.  Although I suppose that they might not want to compete with their Starcraft and Warcraft products, but I don't see that as a credible view point.





   

World of Warcraft Battlegrounds

I find participating in them to be very, very frustrating.  It seems that all people want to do is fight in the middle of the battleground.  Now look people that is not the way to win and get good Honour Points (HP).  You win by using tactics and adapting to the game situation.

I find Alterac Valley to be the most frustrating, because people believe, despite the obvious flaw that it rarely works, that all you do is rush to the first boss and then on to the second after holding a few towers or bunkers and win.  The first point to make is that if the opposition do the same all it becomes is a race and there is no element of PvP.  It is a PvP encounter, if you don't like PvP then go on a PvE Raid and let those who do like PvP play compete.  The second point is if the opposition use tactics you will lose.  The most obvious counter is to defend the first Boss with around a dozen or so defenders.  That simple tactic wipes out the attacking force very easily and wins the game from there on in, because the aggressor is immediately pushed back.

I am in the process of writing a series on how to play the World of Warcraft battlegrounds.  The first two in the series can be found here:

Warsong Gulch

Alterac Valley

Have a good read and let me know what you think.

And remember that the New to World of Warcraft website is probably the best free World of Warcraft guide for new players available.