This post is going to get me so much spam….

Because I’m procrastinating SUCH a giver, I was checking the stats over at BlockB.com, and I noticed something that I’ve noticed before: Solo activities don’t generate nearly the traffic to that site that group activities do.

For example, when Zico had his monster run of singles in late 2015/early 2016, traffic was pretty much unaffected. Recently he gave some great performances at the MAMAs, and while there’s been some impact on traffic, it’s not like when the group appeared there two years ago. (Yes, even though he won. Winning doesn’t matter.)

It’s not like he doesn’t have any traction with English speakers, either–that London show sold out really fucking quickly, and “Bermuda Triangle” was the number one K-Pop song on U.S. iTunes.

So I did some Google searches on his name, and BlockB.com tends not to come up on those. Plus what did come up–eh. I mean, it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be, his Wikipedia article is there as are links to his music. But there’s also an awful lot about his dating life, and very little comes up that would help people who are interested in Zico connect to the Greater Block B Musical Complex (which I assume would be of interest to them, since Zico generates a healthy chunk of it).

That left me with:

Choice #1: Start a new Web site focusing on Zico alone.

No–too expensive, too time-consuming, and it doesn’t connect people who are interested in him to the rest of the group.

Choice #2: Learn about something I have been very happy to know nothing about for the past 46 years–namely, search engine optimization.

Ugh. Choice #2 it was! Mainly this involved fiddling with tags and metadata, as well as captioning images with completely unnecessary text:

Block B Zico Park Kyung P.O Jaehyo U-Kwon B-Bomb Taeil dorks

And then–boy, this really makes you feel like you’re accomplishing something–you hide the captions that you just wrote so that no visitor can see them. (Unlike people, search engine bots can’t see what’s in an image, so you have to spell it out for them. And then hide it.)

Anyway, it’s done now, so if you feel like moseying on over there and letting me know if you spot any wayward captions or anything else that looks weird, that would be very nice of you. Thanks!

ETA: If you’re curious about this for your own purposes, I’ll note that such optimization really does have an impact. I went to the trouble of registering the site with Google Search Console, and I requested a new crawl twice–the first after my initial revision, and the second after I realized that most people search for information on members by using the word “profile.” The effect on traffic was quite immediate (e.g. putting “profile” into the hidden captions on the Members page resulted in a 25% increase in traffic to that page).

Of course now it will be hard to make historical comparisons, but oh well!