Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s guide to SEO

Carl Hopkinson

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, had seven glorious years on our TV screens battling the forces of darkness from demons to robots to gods, yet how would the Slayer and her Scooby gang cope with the arduous task of SEOing a website for Google? Buffy knows the way to a Vampire’s heart is through his chest with a sharpened stake (possibly Mr Pointy) but does she know how to achieve top rankings in Google for a competitive industry?

You bet she does. This guide will tell you just what the chosen one would do to SEO a website and how her Scooby gang would chip in with support.

Rupert Giles (Ripper)

Sadly, Giles has an inbuilt hatred of all things computer related so his input into any SEO campaign would have to be purely strategic. Luckily, Giles is an expert at strategy and research, which is essential for any SEO campaign. Giles would begin by researching your keywords (using his books of course, he refuses to touch an infernal computer) and determine which keywords would bring you the most traffic. Giles would also conduct extensive research into your competitors so that all of their strengths and weaknesses are identified and assessed.

Knowing your competition is the first step to bettering your own website in the search engines.

Willow

Willow brings two very useful skills to the table when it comes to SEO. Firstly, she’s a computer expert so knows every programming language ever written (essential when working on many different websites) and secondly she’s well versed in the dark arts.

OK, so black hat SEO isn’t necessarily what we’d suggest but Willow isn’t exactly black hat as such, she just uses the dark arts as a Wicker to produce those results that conventional SEO methods would take longer to do. For example, Willow could cast a protection spell to ensure that your on-page SEO isn’t easily identified and copied by your competitors. This alone is worth the time it takes!

Cordelia

To Cordy, being popular is a full time vocation. This fits in rather well with any SEO requirements as search engine optimisation is all about popularity; the more popular your website, the more links it has, the better it ranks. This is why Cordelia would be an excellent link builder for your website. She’ll conduct a link building exercise as though it was a campaign for prom queen, and Queen C always wins a popularity contest.

Cordelia is also the queen of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. After all, who could be more sociable that Cordy?

Xander

Other than fetching doughnuts and generally putting himself in harm’s way, what use is Xander in conducting a successful SEO campaign?

Simple, Xander is funny, quick witted and incredibly infectious (that’s infectious in a nice way as opposed to the flu that saw Buffy hospitalised in season 2). Because of Xander’s comedic touch he is the perfect choice to write the content for your website, generating the sort of link bait that earns you hundreds of links and tens of thousands of visitors.

Buffy Summers

With all of this additional support work being done by the members of the Scooby gang, it’s up the Slayer herself to do the hard work of actually patrolling your website for any demons that may be causing it to rank poorly. You may have duplicate text, canonicalisation errors, hidden text, doorway pages, unnecessary code… the list of nasties possibly holding back your website is endless, but the Slayer is up to the task of finding and dealing with all of them.

Buffy will identify what needs to be dealt with on your website and she’ll slay it, probably while worrying about a test the next day and making one of her trademark quips.

Buffy and the gang are ready for the SEO that needs to be done on your website, and of course to stop any potential end of the world type apocalypse that may spring up in the mean time.