lenina grasps SEO (= steal source code)
I think I’ve finally understood SEO. I’ve always known the importance of SEO and especially, natural search (e.g. importance of title tag, always provide meta description and keywords), but in practice have never really had to bother with stuff in the header tag, or felt it necessary (e.g. I have a website relating to my PhD thesis, but neither want nor need a lot of traffic).
Seeing however that I now have a target (KPI) for web traffic to a specific site, it’s in my keen interest to optimise natural search. Thus, yesterday I had a look at a competitor site that ranks high in Google (I think it was no. 1 or no. 2) and copied over the title, meta description, and meta keywords for all their navigation top level pages into a word doc (the navigation structure and the site’s subject matter are quite similar to ours).
I’ll modify these slightly and will then replace our current data with the modified ones of the successful competitor, and I’m hoping to see us rising in Google over the next few weeks months (?).
Note that the key to this was my ability to be able to read html source code, which is a ridiculously easy thing for those in the know but looks overly complicated and techie for those who don’t (most people at my work don’t even seem to know that sites have a ’source code’ that you can look at in your browser).
In fact, stealing from others’ source code was one of the first things I learnt in a ‘Internet and Gender Studies’ course 12 years ago at the University of Cologne. We used to do it more with nice layouts and such, not regarding SEO (I don’t think we knew much about SEO back then, there certainly wasn’t a big science to it if I remember correctly).
Filed under: Internet, Marketing, Work | Tagged: Google, Work, Internet, SEO, Search engine optimization, World Wide Web, Website, Source code, Search Engines
Do you really think that the content of the target website is that important? How about incoming links?
no, the content isn’t important at all. It’s pretty shit in fact but we’re currently only measured by quantity of web visits. I think a combination of improved SEO (copying what works for our closest competitor in the same market) and link building is the best strategy, as the great majority of our traffic comes from natural search.
Re: link building, I might use the competitor as starting point again - finding out who links to them, and then try and get similar links to our site.