There are a couple of things I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, and a few things in this area that I know what outcome I'm after but not quite how to get it.

#1

The landing page of all advertising needs to be 100% promotional. In my post on the Bucket (which anyone interested in marketing really needs to read)I talk about "the path." When you want to take your prospect down a specific path the only way to do that is to give them only one option. The page will have a TON of information about WHY you should play, and what will be great about doing CF - but will not contain anything that is nuts and bolts. (Like class/skill pages.)It will give a little information, ask them to play, give more information, ask to play, give more information, ask to play.

I'm 100% sure this is the right way to do this.

Now where I'm not sure is where we run into seperating from this page or not. To me it's actually a question of search engine response. If I knew how, I'd build the page in such a way that people who are looking for "online game, free game, online roleplay, mush, moo, mud" etc. etc. are going to find our CF promo page. I know a few tricks that work for me in a local market, but I don't have a ton of experience getting it done on a global scale. Can someone help here?

I DO know that one of the easiest ways to rank in the search engine is to use the key words in your URL. Therefore being carrionfields.com is going to rank us high for people searching Carrion Fields, but we're nowhere near the top for searches like "online roleplaying" or "free games." Which is really what we need to do... (Once I get done with the Bucket, and define our target market I'm going to start working on creating rather than capturing marketshare, and that kinda goes along with this post, that happens later tho.)

I also know that one of the things that matters in your search engine ranking is how much traffic your site gets. If you seperate the promo page from this page you lose the advantage of all the people who frequent this site.

That's why one of my suggestions was to have a promo page that appears at home on carrionfields.com, and then lock what is here now behind a password. If you want a password, you give an email and answer whether or not your new to CF. So that way we can do some damage control, cuz anyone new to mudding is going to overwhelmed by all the forums, help files and class info. I would much rather have them get really interested in the game, click to play, go through the academy, and then make their way on to forums later on.

Someone who understands how we might rank high in searches for people who are bored and looking for free entertainment needs to weigh in more than anyone else right now. After that's done I can work with that person for the content of the page itself. In lieu of that, we'll do the best we can to learn about it and implement as best we can.