What’s Your SEO Blood Type?

Vampires have come a long way since Bram Stoker’s Dracula terrorized Transylvania at the end of the 19th century. With a history in folklore reaching back to prehistoric times, vampires are in their golden age, having earned a place as a romanticized and fantasized stalwart of modern entertainment culture.

Make fun of Twilight all you want, but who can forget the beautiful and heart-wrenching tale of Interview with the Vampire? Vampires hold the promise of supernatural power, immortality, and an enviable, if not eerie, appreciation for the vitality of life. And while our undead cousins have an aversion to sunlight, we can have some fun looking at how vampires’ modern-day manifestations illuminate the search engine optimization industry.

A stretch, you say? If you’re accusing me of putting too much stake into vampire mania, guilty as charged. What can I say? I wanted an excuse to talk about vampires. The fourth season of True Blood premieres this weekend and that show’s my number one. On with the vampire-SEO comparisons!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I was a loyal fan of this TV show (1997-2003) and the 1992 movie before it because as a young girl I admired the kick-ass female lead slaying evil, one blood-sucker at a time. Sure it was campy, but it had fun and always entertained. In terms of SEO, Buffy is like your old-school SEO. It’s the foundation for the form as we know it today. A simplified version of the vampire genre’s current incarnation, Buffy is a story that’s full of potential.

The Vampire Diaries

Just having finished its second season, The Vampire Diaries follows a strong female in high school and the forever-young vampire brothers who fall in love with her. In that way, it uses Buffy as a spring board for storytelling, in its high school setting and fem-focused point of view. It’s slick and sexy and packaged for a mainstream network audience. In SEO terms, this story is a reliable success because it uses solid fundamentals, following a formula based on what worked in the past and what works now.

Twilight

Now we’ve reached the battiest of the bunch. Again we see a teenage girl torn between her love for two supernaturals. Except this vampire isn’t like any you’ve seen before. No, this vampire sparkles and, following vampire dude knocking up our heroine, his spawn rips out of her like some gory scene from Alien. This one’s emo, overly brooding and seems to drag on. SEO translation? A misguided interpretation that falls apart under close scrutiny and yet finds favor with some nonetheless. Don’t fall victim to the glitz and glitter.

True Blood

Finally we get to my favorite of the group. Vampires “come out of the coffin,” if you will, when synthetic blood is created that’s able to sustain them. A waitress in a small Louisiana town falls in love with a vampire, and adventure ensues as they run into shape shifters, witches, werewolves and all stripes of supernatural. The show is gritty and sometimes taboo, like bleeding-edge SEO. Sometimes things gets ugly and it’s not for the weak of heart, but you’ve gotta love how it pushes boundaries and isn’t afraid to experiment.

Alright, now I’ve had my chance to leech onto the vampire craze with a silly post. How about you? Care to join in the pun? Add your vampire jokes in the comments!

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.