The art of manipulating organic results: Carbon Copying SERPS

Hey easy.. take down that frown on your face. This article is nothing about any black hat SEO techniques. Well, it has got shades of grey, but it is fair  and it is completely legitimate.

Hmm, let’s put it this way. It’s about manipulating the SERPs to your advantage using the SERPS itself.

Example: You have a keyword that you want yourself to rank high on. Unfortunately, there are lot of established sites which rank high for that particular keyword. So, the chances of you breaking into the top is bleak and it may take several trial and error methods and indefinite time.
But you have this cool new way by which you can simply break into the top 1, 2 or 3rd position and if you wish all of them for the same keyword. Sounds interesting? Hop on!

I’ll call this method “Carbon Copying SERPS”.

It goes like this. Take the keyword for example “free wordpress themes”. This keyword has a high traffic volume.

If you do a search on Google for “free wordpress themes” then it would give you all the established sites on the SERPS. Please don’t mistake when I say established sites.

I mean the ones, which has an advantage of

- having it’s content propogated more quickly,
- having the maximum number of incoming links,
- having more references on anchor texts with the keyword
- with an older domain name etc.

To beat them in a short span of time is difficult.

And you have a fairly new website for which I assume that the following points are ticked off.

- Is indexed on the SERPS.
- Has a decent level of authority for content.
- Has good content and some fair amount of link juice.

Now, what we would do is go to all the established sites, and research on what their content is. See if we can trace a pattern out of it.

Have they provided images?
Have they listed the themes in numbers?
Have they done SMO?
Have they written enough textual content? If yes in what pattern?

Research on as many as the metrics as possible, mostly on site optimization metrics. Because this is the only area where you’d be doing some homework.

Now goto your blog and start designing .

- Design a layout that gives maximum leverage to on site optimization factors.
- Make a list which is SEO friendly. (Food for thought*)
- Make a list of all the best sites on the SERPS, offering “Free Wordpress themes”.
- Give them thumbnail images or snapshots.
- Write SEO friendly textual content on the list for the thumbnails. (Again food for thought*)
- Use extremely attractive headings. (Food for thought*)
- Package it really well.

By now, you should have a SEO friendly website, with a SEO friendly design, with the best content on the selected keyword, with the best compilation and the best copy.

Now go to and fro on the content, MAKE SURE there is no duplicate content on the copy at all. Redraft the content and make it a attractive package.

Now, submit the article to the social media sites. Digg, SU and the like. This is easily said than done.
In fact, to be honest with you, this is the catch of this trick. There is no guarantee that everyone who did the above steps exactly will make it to the top unless they do the social media part correctly. I can even say, one who does the social media submission part correctly will win.

Some interesting points here.

- You might have designed a great copy, but you suck at SM. You lose.
- You have extremely good content, something like the WIkipedia, there is no Viral marketing flavor in your copy. You still lose.
In fact, the offsite optimization part of the game will be taken part of the Social Media while you sit back and relax.

So, essentially what you’ve done is -

Selected a keyword, picked the best sites that has ranks high on it, studied the pattern, created a list from it, made excellent on page SEO factors to support it, fed it to the demons !

So, it’s not all that grey as I suggested right? And there is a bit of that retarded SMO thingy too. Having said it, I’m not sure if this will work for all keywords. It does for certain type of “numberable” content though.