Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips and Tricks

Here are some SEO (search engine optimization) tips on how to get your band or music site to show up higher in organic searches (i.e. non-paid search results):

1. Think Like a Searcher

What words will your visitors be searching on when you want your site to appear in the results?

Pick keywords (and their synonyms) appropriate for your target audience to use in the content of your site. Focus on medium-specific to very specific terms so there won't be so many other results competing with your site.

Don't use your keywords too many times on a page or a search engine may consider it keyword spam.

2. HTML Elements

Use your keywords in your page TITLE, meta descriptions, in H1 tags, in bold (or strong or em) font, and as hyperlinked text. Use different appropriate TITLE tags on different pages.

Use your keywords in your image file names, directory paths, ALT attributes and TITLE attributes. Use keywords in anchor TITLE attributes.

Most modern search engines ignore the meta keywords tag which is notorious for spam, but that doesn't mean you should not use the meta keywords tag.

If your site has versions of essentially the same page, but with different URLs (like sort order, or different skins), use link rel="canonical" tags in your page headers pointing to a single primary URL. Search engines will apply page rank "votes" from all links to the various versions of your page to the single canonical URL. That increases its page rank density, meaning your canonical page link will appear higher in search results.

Also add other useful link and meta tags various services, like Facebook and iPhone, may recognize.

3. Keywords in URLs

Use your keywords in your page and image URLs if possible (see example below, both go to the same place). Keywords may be in the actual file names on your server, or you could use URL rewriting to convert URLs with keywords into server file names.

http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Deathly-Hallows-Book/dp/0545010225
http://www.amazon.com/These-Words-Get-Indexed-Too/dp/0545010225

Google prefers keywords in URLs to be in lower case and separated by dashes (-), rather than spaces (which get rendered as "+" or "%20") or underscores (_).

4. Links to Your Site

Google gives your site extra credit for other sites that link to yours. Get other sites, blogs, and discussion forums to link to your site, preferably from hyperlinked keywords. So provide easy-to-copy deep-links or permalinks on each of your pages.

Syndicate your content (e.g. with RSS feeds) so links back to your site appear on other sites.

Provide common social bookmarking sharing links (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious.com, Digg, Buzz, etc.)

Find content-appropriate Wikipedia articles to link to your site as a reference.

Many search engines honor rel="nofollow" in link tags. If that attribute is present on a site's links, don't bother putting your links there - search engines may follow them to find your site, but they won't consider the link a "vote" for your page in their page rank.

5. On-Site Links

Hyperlink keywords on your own site to other pages on your site, or to your site search. This is why many sites now display "tag clouds."

6. Long Tail Text

Have lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of words. Not every page will get more than 1 or 2 hits ever, but in aggregate the search traffic adds up.

Use HTML rather than PDF or word processor files. Though some search engines will index document formats, some don't. Besides, proprietary document files are harder for visitors to access than HTML anyway.

7. Text Instead of Flash, Images, or AJAX

Render keywords on your site in text, not images or Flash. Search engines have no way of knowing what's in those files.

Search engines don't generally execute JavaScript, so any text available only from AJAX calls is not visible to spiders.

8. Traffic Reports

Monitor your traffic logs or reports. Your Home page may not actually be your site's front door. Make sure search entry pages are relevant to the search terms, and help users who first enter your site from a deeper page find other pages on your site.

Use your traffic reports to see what top search terms people use to find your page or site and update your pages to optimize for the keywords people are actually using to find your site - even if they're slightly different from what you first thought. If Google decides your site is the best place for keywords you didn't expect, optimize for those words. Ride the wave, don't fight it.

9. Spelling Variations

Include some common typos of your brand names and keywords so people who make the same typo in their search see your site in the results. (But see also tip #14.)

10. Make Dynamic URLs Look Static

Make site search look like regular pages with URL rewriting. Search engine spiders won't follow always dynamic or script directory links, or links with query string parameters, because they could result in an infinite number of pages, but if you make the spider think your dynamic page is really static, they'll index them.

For example, make a search URL that is really http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?term=lyrics look like this: http://www.mysite.com/search/lyrics. On Apache, you can do that with your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule search/(.*) /cgi-bin/search.cgi?term=$1 [L]

The (.*) part means "take anything that appears here and put it in variable $1". The $1 part means "take whatever was in the first parentheses and put it here." The [L] means this is the last rewrite rule and the server can stop looking for other rewrite rules. Move the [L] to your last rewrite rule if you have more than one.

11. Avoid Frames

Don't use frames! Most search engines can't (or just won't) navigate to sub-frames. And if a searcher clicks through directly to one of your sub-frames, your site probably won't display properly.

12. Sitemaps

Implement a Google Sitemap.

13. Avoid Link Farms

Don't get your link on link-only pages or parked domains. Some search engines penalize sites that appear on these spam pages.

14. Don't be Devious

Use your keywords in real content. Don't put keywords in tiny fonts or in the same color as the background text. Some search engines penalize sites that use non-visible text.

Proliferation of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking (saving links for your favorite web pages to a public site) has exploded in the last few years in terms of people using social bookmarking services, traffic to the bookmark sites, and the sheer number of me-too services. Here's a summary of some of the services available, and JavaScript links you can copy so your visitors can promote your pages in their bookmarks.

The Granddaddy of All Social Bookmarking Sites

digg.com - News and web pages. Started out for the techy set, but has expanded to a general interest audience.

Big sites dedicated to social bookmarking

These sites have from 1-3 million visitors per month according to Compete.com:

stumbleupon.com
reddit.com
technorati.com - A blog search engine. Tends to have the techy and science crowd.
del.icio.us - A general interest bookmark service. Acquired by Yahoo!

Portal Sites

All the big portals have added their own social bookmarking services.

bookmarks.yahoo.com - One of Yahoo! three or more mookmarking features. Nothing like focusing your business...
facebook.com - The social networking site for college kids and fresh-outs.
favorites.live.com - Microsoft's MSN followon.
favorites.my.aol.com - AOL
google.com/bookmarks - Google's bookmarking feature.
myjeeves.ask.com - Yet another search engine's bookmarking.
myspace.com - The social network for high school kids.
myweb.yahoo.com - Another Yahoo! bookmarking service.
netscape.com - Another AOL one.

Medium Sized Verticals

These sites focus mostly on social bookmarking and discussion forums, and have between 100,000 and 1,000,000 visitors a month, though not all exclusively to their bookmarking feature:

slashdot.org/bookmark - The discussion site for cranky software developers.
newsvine.com - A general interest user-submitted news links site.
fark.com - News of the weird for the fraternity crowd.
faves.com
blinklist.com
mixx.com
furl.net
segnalo.alice.it
diigo.com

Smaller Bookmarking Verticals

These sites have between 10,000 and 100,000 visitors per month.

ma.gnolia.com
netvouz.com
simpy.com
backflip.com
spurl.net
blogmarks.net
linkagogo.com
mister-wong.de
feedmelinks.com

Band names need numbers

Random thought of the day. It seems there are a lot of popular bands with numbers in their names:

10 Years
112
2 Pistols
2Pac
3 Doors Down
30 Seconds To Mars
311
38 Special
3OH!3
4 Non Blondes
44
50 Cent
Avenged Sevenfold
Ben Folds Five
blink-182
D12
D4L
Day26
E-40
Eiffel 65
Eve 6
Family Force 5
Five Finger Death Punch
Five For Fighting
Jackson 5
Maroon 5
Nine Days
Nine Inch Nails
One Day As A Lion
OneRepublic
Powerman 5000
Seven Mary Three
Sixpence None The Richer
Sixx:A.M.
Sum 41
Tech N9ne
The B-52's
Three 6 Mafia
Three Days Grace
Three Dog Night
U2
UB40

Blast from Last Year

Here's an article from last year that's so classically luddite, it needs to be linked again.

Universal's CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He's Giving Songs Away

The dinosaur CEO of UMG seems proud of the fact that he doesn't "get" technology. My favorite quotes from the interview:

Morris insists there wasn't a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. "There's no one in the record company that's a technologist," Morris explains. "That's a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn't. They just didn't know what to do. It's like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?"

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn't an option. "We didn't know who to hire," he says, becoming more agitated. "I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me." Morris' almost willful cluelessness is telling. "He wasn't prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology," says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. "He just doesn't have that kind of mind."

It seems that as CEO, Morris' job was not to just watch the royalty checks roll in, but to be sure his company was positioned for changes in the market. The Internet was a huge change (obviously), but he seems willfully, proudly ignorant of how he could have structured his company to anticipate the disruption, and leverage the massive new distribution channel.

Dinosaurs

Digital music firms pay heavy price for labels' support

More evidence that elderly big label managers are looking for punitive advances to fund their retirement benefits rather than building a healthy digital distribution chain for their industry.

Here we have an unnamed label executive comparing the new business of online media to opening a bricks and mortar store on Madison Avenue. They continue to be clueless that the physical music sales are dying.

Delivering music online has significant costs, but none that you can visit as a customer. Spinning disks at data centers and CDNs, and developing compelling service software are significant investements. At 15% margins and multi-million dollar advances will fool some Dot Com Bubble 2.0 investors for a while, but once the money runs out, the labels are no further along.

The labels should be enabling in new distribution solutions, not punishing them.

Label hires techie

The geeks were right; music labels bow to technology

...EMI Group hired Douglas Merrill, the former Google Chief of Information, to run the label's digital unit.

There's nothing that says that the labels must be part of the finished equation... but the record companies are going to have to morph into smaller entities that represent fewer acts but oversee their total output: music, video, concerts, and merchandise.

Fred Wilson on the New Streaming

Something Important Is On The Horizon In The Music Business

In an always-on connected world, nobody will need downloads. I'll reorganize what I think is Fred's most important message to content owners and distributors, and service providers.

For content owners and distributors:

We need someone to create an easy to search streamable library of all the recorded music in the world. We need to be able to grab a track and embed it on our blog. We need to be able to see how many people played it... This all has to be licensed and legal and it has to result in money flowing to the artists.

For service providers (this goes to my thesis that it's the services who will enable the crowd to determine what acts get discovered and what music becomes popular, rather than relying on big promotion):

We need others to be able to crawl these user pages with the embedded music and create algorithms based on who posted it, how often it was played, and how often it was reblogged and linked to. The services that do all of that need to be able to play the music that flows out of these social algorithms in the same way.