You’re a pirate, your goal is to find treasure. You do this by continuously figuring out the next URL, I won’t tell you how, it’s a mystery game! I can however tell you, that you might need to do some googling along the way.
Play now!
SEO Pirates is an SEO game which will test your skills and problem solving abilities. Initially it’s enough with some general technical understanding and patience, but as you progress through the levels it becomes more and more important to look at the site from a technical SEO perspective.
The SEO game is mostly linear, and I strongly recommend that you use a Google sheet or an Excel sheet to keep track of the URLs you’ve found.
The game is divided into several levels, with multiple pages and problems to solve in each level. If you manage to reach the final URL of the last level you’ll get a spot in the not so secret scoreboard (where you might be accompanied by Google bot, hopefully the only page on the subdomain it’ll ever visit). That’s the only hint you’ll get in this SEO game, the rest is up to you to figure out!
Please don’t post any spoilers or help each other publically, the fun and the learning lies in figuring things out on your own.
SEO Pirates – The back story
For someone who hasn’t worked professionally with web development, one of the hardest aspects of getting into the business of SEO is the technical aspect.
I decided to launch my own site in order to improve my knowledge and understanding of the more technical areas of web programming and web applications, and how it eventually intertwines with and affects SEO. However, I wasn’t creative enough to come up with a particular subject to create a site about where I could test all these things, so I decided to make a mystery game.
I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from oap.ninja (which I never got a chance to play but have read about) and technicalseo.expert by Alexis Sanders, but I wanted to give it my own personal touch. I decided for it to be about pirates, because pirates are pretty cool.
As mentioned, the game’s difficulty progresses from kind of easy to pretty difficult. I guess this is normal in a game, but in this case it actually comes from my continuous improvement in actually working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and the .htaccess file (and other server side scripts and tweaks).
I’m not a graphic designer, I’m actually not a visual person at all (just look at this WordPress template…), so it might not be the most beautiful SEO game you’ve seen, but that’s not the point. The point is for me (and you) to learn more about technical SEO, become more curious and to have fun while doing so!
About the creator of the SEO game
My name is Rasmus, I am the Director of SEO at Quisma Denmark and GroupM Denmark. I help Danish, Nordic and international companies with developing and executing their SEO strategies to reach the top of the search engines with their strategically important keywords.
If you like the game, or if you have any thoughts or comments, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn. I am a lot more active on LinkedIn so that would be recommended!
F.A.Q
The purpose is for you to get a feel for technical SEO, and to have fun while doing so! It was also my way of learning more about the various technical aspects of a website.
Well, primarily for myself, so that I could learn more about technical SEO. But in that process, I quickly realized that it might be a lot of fun for other SEOs as well!
Unfortunately, no