Linkdisco: Internet Marketing for Musicians

Search engines want the best, most relevant websites to appear on their results pages for any particular query. Trust is important here - the more trust you can establish with search engines, the easier it will be for your site to gain high rankings.

Building links is one way of doing this. On the Web, a link to a page counts as a ‘vote of approval’ for that page. If lots of different websites all ‘vote’ for your site by linking to it, this is a sign that you have valuable content worth pointing to.

Search engines like valuable content.

However, just as with keywords, not all links are created equal.

Ask Not What Links Can Do For You…

If a search engine finds two pages about ‘bass strings’, where one of them has ten links to it from external sites and the other has ten thousand, it’s probable that the page with more links will rank higher.

However, if the ten links are all from websites that are highly trusted, and the ten thousand links are from link farms and generic free directories, then the site with the ten high-quality inlinks will probably rank higher.

So, to summarise, here’s what you need to do, in ascending order of effectiveness:

1. Get links to your site.
2. Get links to your site using targeted (but varied) anchor text.
3. Get links to your site from trusted websites using targeted (but varied) anchor text.
4. Get links to your site from trusted websites that are topically related to your website using targeted (but varied) anchor text.

…What Can You Do For Your Links?

We have established that links to your website increase its ability to rank for keywords – particularly those keywords used in the incoming anchor text. But how can you get other websites to link to yours?

This is an essential question, and there are many answers. Some require more work than others, some are more effective than others. Let’s have a look at a few to get started with…

• Profile Pages
• Personal Networking
• Forums
• Blog Comments
• Directory Submissions
• Articles
• Social Bookmarking

When it comes to choosing a name for your band, it makes sense to avoid creating competition for yourself. The Internet is a great research tool, particularly for finding out if and where particular phrases are currently in use.

Even if you’ve already registered your bandname’s dot com domain, that doesn’t mean there’s no other band out there with the same name.

To avoid potential legal problems later on, it’s a good idea to ensure that there are no other bands already using your name. As is usual with the law, ignorance is no excuse: you can’t just say you never heard of the other band before.

The Irish band ‘The Frames DC’ were originally called simply ‘The Frames’, until another band called ‘The Frames’ threatened to sue them – so they added the DC and continued on their merry way. Dan Snaith of Caribou is also very familiar with this sort of thing, as his band used to be called Manitoba until someone else… well, you get the idea.

Here’s how to avoid a similar problem by making sure you’re the original.

How To Make Sure Your Band Doesn’t Exist Already

If you search for “my band name” in a search engine (with your actual band’s name in place of “my band name”, but keeping the inverted commas), you will see a selection of pages from the Internet that contain that exact phrase. If no results come back, then you’re probably safe - and you can give yourself credit for having a healthy (or particularly twisted) imagination.

If some results come back, but none are related to music, then you’re probably okay too. However, it might be worthwhile making another couple of searches just to be on the safe side.

Try typing these into Google:

• “my band name” music
• “my band name” album
• “my band name” gig
• “my band name” single

If none of these results indicate a band is using your name already, then you’re probably good to go.

Choosing A New Band Name – SEM Style

If you don’t have a name for your band yet, here’s an idea for tapping into a pre-existing traffic stream and giving your band’s website a ready-made source of visitors.

If you don’t really have any strong opinions about what your band should call itself, why not do a bit of keyword research and name yourself after a search term?

If your band name just happens to be a phrase that gets a steady stream of daily traffic, doesn’t have too much competition and is somehow thematically related to the world of music, then you could regard yourself as being very lucky indeed.

Or… you could deliberately choose a band name that meets all these criteria.

Not very rock’n’roll, perhaps, but a lot of the stuff people search for every day makes for extremely interesting reading. Keywords can be surprisingly inspiring – many of the search engine queries I see every day would make much better band names than the old ‘definite article plus plural noun’ formula, for instance.

Alternatively, you could use this approach when naming albums or songs. If a traffic term catches your eye as being particularly unusual or interesting, why not take advantage of it?

If you don’t know how to find traffic terms (phrases that people are searching for every day) then you should have a look at my introductory post on keyword selection.

Never underestimate the value of a good name - this applies to domain names even more than it does to band names. The Internet is built on words, and words lead people to where they want to go (whether they know it or not).

There are a lot of websites where anyone can go and set up a profile for their band, post a few photos and some mp3s. This is well worth doing, but it isn’t enough. A MySpace page can be a very useful networking tool, but it shouldn’t be your main band page. You need to set yourself apart from the millions of other bands who also have MySpace pages; you need to show that you’re serious about what you’re doing (even if your music is all about having fun).

These are just some of the reasons why you need your own domain name, and why it should be easy to remember.

Is this name taken?

If you already have a band name, the first thing you should do is check to see if the .com has been registered by someone else. Unless you’ve got a particularly odd name, chances are the domain is already gone.

Type the name of your band (without spaces) into the address bar at the top of the browser, put a dot-com at the end, then hit return. If you arrive at a web page, then the domain has already been registered.

If you arrive at an error screen, then you might be in luck. However, this is not a guarantee that the domain is available. You can use a resource such as http://www.allwhois.com to see if it has any registration information for the domain.

You can also use any domain registration service to check availability of a given TLD (top-level domain – com, net, org, etc).

Registering A Domain – The Basics

The actual process of registering a domain name is very simple, although you will need a credit card. There are a huge number of domain registration services on the Web, and there isn’t very much difference between them in terms of quality of service. Apart from ensuring that they are actually a legitimate and accredited domain registration company, the main thing to look out for is price.

It may be handy to get your web hosting and domain name from the same company, and you may get a better deal by doing so. However, choosing a web hosting package is a more complicated issue, with other details to watch out for. For the moment we’ll just consider the registration process - I’ll create a separate post dealing with web hosting later on.

Here are a few well-known domain registration service providers:

• Godaddy.com
• Ipowerweb.com
• Yahoo.com
• Register365.com

There are many more, of course, so you can shop around to find the cheapest. You can register a domain for one year, two years, three years and perhaps more; the longer you register for, the better the deal usually is. If you’re serious about your band, then I recommend registering your domain for at least two years. Watch out for special introductory offers – you can sometimes get a ‘first-time registration’ discount.

Note: It’s not clear if the search engines take domain registration length into account when determining the trustworthiness of a website. If they don’t at the moment, they may well do in the near future. Because people who create spammy websites don’t intend to keep them for long, they tend to register the domains for one year. If you register yours for longer than the bare minimum, this might be one less flag raised with the search engines, and every little helps in this game.

My .Com is Gone – Should I Get A Different TLD?

If you find that ‘mybandname.com’ has already been taken, you need to decide whether to stick with your band name or try something different.

If you are a reasonably well-established band with a lot of loyal fans, you might prefer to keep your current name. In that case, you should try to get the .net top-level domain instead.

Even if you do get the dot com extension, you should also try to get the domain for your country of origin. For example, the .ie extension is for Ireland, and is highly trusted by the search engines because only someone with a genuine connection to Ireland is allowed to register one. The Norwegian TLD .no is similarly trusted. A .co.uk, .us, or .de will work nicely, although their registration policies are somewhat less restricted.

If you are a brand new band without any fanbase, and your dot com domain is taken, I would recommend coming up with a new band name. After all, you probably want to be as original as possible, and if the dot com is gone that means someone else thought of that phrase already (although it may not be in a musical context). Owning the dot com domain for your bandname is very important, so you should at least consider changing to a name you can be in pole position for.

I’ve written another post that provides some tips on using the Internet to help you choose a new band name.

Why Is DotCom So Important?

The .com extension is still seen by most people as the default for the Web. As such, dot com sites tend to get a lot of ‘type-in traffic’.

For example, when someone is looking for ‘bass strings’, they might type in ‘bassstrings.com’, even though they don’t know if such a site exists. It is also common for people to type searches into their URL bar – the browser will usually take them directly to the .com for the phrase they typed in.

For a band, you can probably see where this is going. If someone hears about you and wants to find out more, the first thing they will do is visit ‘yourbandname.com’. If this turns out to be a site about plumbing valves, your potential fan may be somewhat disillusioned.

Also, it’s easier to get someone to remember ‘yourbandname.com’ rather than some unusually formatted variant. It may be hard enough to get people to remember your band name in the first place – anything you can do to make it easier for fans (or clients) to find you is well worth the effort.

Keyword selection is the first step in creating findable content on the Web (well, one of the first steps, at any rate). Many people are unaware of its importance, but choosing the right keywords can have an enormous impact on your visitor numbers. Whether you’re targeting search engines or social media, the specific phrases you use - particularly in your titles/headlines - can make all the difference.

Consider these two scenarios:

• You regularly create great content, without any overt consideration of whether (or how) people will find it, and gradually build up a trickle of incremental traffic.
• You regularly create great content. You then tweak your content slightly, in a manner informed by keyword research, and grow your traffic exponentially.

Both are entirely plausible - but which scenario seems the most appealing?

Of course, you need to have good ideas in the first place - concepts and content should be your bread and butter. You can write a great post without any consideration for keyword research, and worry about how to make it search-engine-friendly when it’s written. Or you can go the other way, and write posts specifically to garner inbound links and visitors - a process sometimes referred to as linkbaiting.

Targeting specific phrases is not about keyword stuffing, nor should it seem forced, or reduce the quality of your writing. If your content is good, keep it that way. Don’t try and work phrases into your titles or posts if they just don’t fit.

However, if two phrases work equally well from a writer’s viewpoint, you should choose the one that will bring you the most traffic. This isn’t spam, it’s just intelligent optimisation.

So how do we find out which phrases are valuable?

Basic Keyword Selection Techniques

The easiest keyword research tool to use is called ‘Google’. Other basic keyword research tools you should be familiar with are Yahoo!, Live Search and Ask. However, as Google currently drives the majority of search traffic on the Internet, that’s probably the best place to start.

Let’s take the simplest scenario - you already have a few phrases in mind, and you want to find out if they are worth targeting. For example, you might have written a post about your bass player, entitled “John’s Favourite Bass Strings“.

The keyword phrase in this title is “bass strings”. Now you need to determine two things: how competitive is it, and how many searches does it get.

1. Check For Keyword Competition

This is fairly straightforward - just go to Google and search for “bass strings”.

It’s important to include the inverted commas here, as this will return an exact match for your specific phrase - only pages featuring all the words, in that particular order, will be shown in the search engine results.

You’ll get a set of results that looks something like this:

The first thing to note is the number of pages returned. Google found 515,000 pages in its index containing the phrase “bass strings”.

This means there is quite a bit of competition for the phrase - if you want to be ranked number one in the organic results, you’ll have to beat 515,000 pages to get there. This may be easy or difficult, depending on how well optimised the highest-ranking sites are.

Another thing to look for is the number of sponsored results. There are a lot of sponsored results here (Sponsored Links), which means this is probably a commercial term - people are making money on it. If people are competing for this term on Pay-Per-Click, there’s a good chance that they are competing on SEO too (they may not be doing it very well, of course, but we can look at this in more detail later).

If you type in “bass strings” without the inverted commas, you’ll see that the number of competing pages is much higher - when I searched, it was 766,000. This is the difference between broad match and exact match. The variation can be much more extreme for different keyword phrases.

At the simplest level of evaluating keyword competition, we look at the number of competing pages; if it passes this test, we can move on to check the quality of these competing pages, where we determine how difficult it would be to beat them.

There are a number of useful tools to help us do that, such as Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox, but there’s no point going to that stage of analysis unless the keyword phrase has some traffic to begin with.

2. Check for Keyword Search Traffic

The easiest way to estimate how many searches a keyword receives each day is by using another Google tool called Google Trends. This provides a graph of search traffic over time, and can be very useful for detecting the seasonality of a particular phrase. You can also compare two or more phrases, as shown in the screenshot below.

Here you can see that “bass strings” has a graph, but “keyword selection” does not. If a term has low levels of search traffic, then no graph will show up. This doesn’t mean that the term is useless, however. The bar graphs underneath the main graph can be used to estimate daily search traffic, and are much more responsive to lower levels of traffic.

Trends is only useful for determining traffic if you know the number of searches for one term already. In this case, I know from previous research that “bass strings” gets about 600 searches a day. If you look down at the ‘Region’ section, you’ll see the traffic for “bass strings” as a blue horizontal bar and “keyword selection” in red. By comparing the two bars, we can get an idea of the number of searches for “keyword selection“.

It seems that all the traffic for this phrase is coming from the United States, and it’s probably only about 20-30 searches per day. Not much, but not zero either. If there’s not too much competition, it might be worth throwing a post out there to see if it floats. If you want to target the UK, then you should give this one a miss.

What’s The Magic Number For A Good Keyword?

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are many more things to consider when evaluating keywords; a lot depends on what your objectives are, the type of traffic generated by your phrase and the standard of competing sites.

However, let’s assume it is that simple and try some ballpark figures to get started with.

• Keyword Competition: Try to target terms with fewer than 100,000 competing pages.
• Keyword Traffic: Try to target terms with more than 100 daily searches.

If you need help coming up with keywords, you can try Wordtracker’s GTrends Tool. This free tool generates a list of related searches when you type a keyword in the search box. You can then check traffic numbers for each term in Google Trends by clicking on the symbol in the G column.

Although continually improving, Wordpress is not particularly search-engine-friendly in its default configuration - there are a couple of SEO tweaks you really need to apply before you start using it.

First of all, you should decide what your permalink structure will be. Permalinks are ‘permanent links’ to pages and posts that you write, and they will be automatically generated according to your blog’s permalink settings (although you can edit permalinks individually before posting, either by using the permalink edit feature in Wordpress 2.5 or by creating a ‘post-slug’ in earlier versions).

However, regardless of what exact structure you choose, you should at least try to get some keywords into your permalinks. To view and modify your permalink settings, go to ‘Settings’, then ‘Permalinks’.

Why Are Keyword-Based Permalinks Important?

Having a keyword-rich URL is important for two main reasons: firstly, it helps users to decide whether the page is relevant to them or not. Consider these two pages with the same content but different URLs:

• mysite.com/how-to-optimise-a-blog
• mysite.com/cgi-bin/data/ex1/find/new/geturl.php?=Wsh2323nfiiieelrs&?ID=e230002sdd

If these two URLs were presented as search results, someone looking for information on blog optimisation will probably choose to visit the first URL, as it seems to be focused on the exact topic they wanted. By contrast, the second URL gives no clue as to the actual content of the page.

The second main reason for using keyword-rich URLs is this - when someone links to your page and uses the URL itself as the anchor text, then you get a link to your page containing your targeted phrase in the anchor text. This is quite important, as it is common for links to be posted simply as URLs, and anchor text is a vital part of how search engines figure out what content may be found on your page.

Select Your Categories Carefully

Before you begin blogging, you should have a good idea of what your blog is about. If you have a band, then the blog will be about your band, but if you can incorporate some original content ideas into your site, you’ll have a much better chance of standing out.

Your category titles should be terms with a fairly high search volume (preferably with not too much competition, but decent traffic is essential). They should also be relevant, descriptive and reasonably short. Each post you write within a particular category will serve to enhance the authority of that category.

The default permalink setting for a Wordpress blog is the numbered scheme.

"/blog/?p=123"

You should change this to one that at least includes the post title. Linkdisco uses only the post title, because I want to keep the URLs as short as possible, but a good alternative is to use the category base followed by the post title. To do this, choose custom permalink structure and enter “%category%/%postname%” in the box (without quotes).

SEO Plugins For Wordpress

Fortunately, there are many good SEO plugins available that take a lot of the work out of optimising a Wordpress site. It’s vital that each post you write has a succinct and search-engine-friendly title and description. SEO plugins can do this for you automatically, and also give you the option of customising various attributes of each post, if you want.

Here are a couple of popular and effective options:

• Headspace - Wordpress SEO Pack
• All-in-One Wordpress SEO

If you already have a blog with lots of posts in a numbered permalink structure, then you can use the Advanced Permalinks plugin to migrate to a more SEO-friendly format (without having to mess around with 301 redirects). If you just change your permalink structure in Wordpress, all your old posts will disappear - well, they’ll still be in the same place, but Wordpress will point to them using the updated link structure, which will return a 404 for old posts. Using the advanced permalinks plugin should solve this problem.

Another plugin you should consider is Related Posts. As its name suggests, this displays a selection of links at the bottom of each post, leading to similar posts within your blog. This isn’t so much an SEO tip as a usability and audience retention technique; the more you engage your audience, the more likely they are to return.

Social Bookmarking Wordpress

Social bookmarking is the process of adding a page to the index of a social media or Web 2.0 site such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon or Facebook. This is a great way of getting links to your blog, and is an essential element of many linkbuilding campaigns.

There are quite a few plugins that allow you to add social bookmarking functionality to your site; you may find that the traffic from smaller niche sites is more targeted (and its easier to reach the home page) than the generic giants such as Digg. You can select which sites you want to display buttons for in the settings menu of your bookmarking plugin.

• Social Bookmarks
• Sociable
• Socialmarker

Before getting into SEO, you might ask: why do I need to optimise my site anyway? If I write content, won’t the search engines spider it automatically?

Well, perhaps - but there’s a huge difference between being indexed and being found.

For example, when someone enters a phrase in a search engine, it’s unlikely that they will go beyond the first page of results (on standard settings, this means 10 organic results) - and only 8% of searchers make it as far as the third page of results.

This means that you really need to be in the top ten results for a phrase if you want to get a significant slice of its traffic. In fact, you really want to be in the top three results - position one typically gets around four times the clicks of position two, and the numbers decline sharply from there (see AOL stats on Jim Boykin’s blog).

It All Begins With Keywords

As it happens, all words are not created equal. If you set up a blog on wordpress.com, write a few posts about ‘intercontinental rabbit silo discernment facilities‘ and wait a while, you will probably end up ranking in position one for the search phrase ‘intercontinental rabbit silo discernment facilities‘.

(Actually, chances are that a scraper site will take your posts and rank above you for this phrase first, but that’s a topic for another day).

This achievement may make you feel good - however, the only reason you will rank for phrases like this is because there’s no competition (which is fantastic). On the other hand, there is also no traffic; nobody is searching for ‘intercontinental rabbit silo discernment facilities‘ - not so fantastic.

I’m not going to get into the ‘long tail‘ here; for the moment, it’s enough to know that a bit of research on what keywords are valuable to you will pay off in the long run. It takes a lot of work to rank for competitive terms; it’s often best to find some less competitive terms that still deliver decent traffic.

One Page, One Phrase

Even moderately competitive terms require significant effort to achieve a good rank; this is why you need to optimise your site from the beginning, and develop it with care and attention. It’s not a case of finding a list of keywords and trying to get your entire website to rank for all of them; what you need to do is optimise each individual page for a particular keyword.

How you structure your site and how you link between internal pages is important too, but for the moment the key point is this: optimising your entire site for a particular keyword doesn’t necessarily make your entire site rank higher for that keyword, it just means the search engines won’t be sure which page is the most relevant to that keyword.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz created a useful diagram that illustrates how search engine spiders (such as Googlebot or Yahoo! Slurp) figure out what each page on your site is about. If you have an internal linking structure that makes sense, and a correspondingly sensible arrangement of title tags on your pages, then the engines can clearly see what’s going on here.

Now, if you were going to only learn two things about SEO, it should probably be these:

1. the importance of title tags (content is king!)
2. the importance of anchor text (links are the web’s arteries and signposts)

In reality, you will need to know much more, of course, but this is a good start.

Essential Introductory Reading

There are many places that offer beginner’s guides to SEO, some more up-to-date than others. SEO is a remarkably dynamic sector; techniques that are valid now may not be effective in three months’ time. This is why it’s important to keep an eye on the blogs of prominent SEO experts. However, it’s still vital to lay a solid foundation of SEO principles; here are a few recommended reads for those interested in learning a bit more…

SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide

Beginner’s Checklist to Learning SEO

Aaron Wall’s SEOBOOK

Dan Thies’ SEO Fast Start

Here’s a list of some places where you can get yourself a blog and/or post your own content online (in no particular order). If you want to set up a site quickly, these might be an ideal option, as you don’t need any Web design or HTML knowledge to get started here.

• Blogger
• Wordpress
• Aeonity
• Blog.com
• Blogates
• Blogr
• Blogsome
• Blogster
• Bravenet
• Clearblogs
• Easyjournal
• I Seek Blog
• Squarespace
• Thoughts.com
• Stikipad
• Scribd
• Tumblr
• Weebly

These are general content sites, and not particularly focused on bands or musicians. However, they generally allow you more control over your content, layout and presentation than typical band profile pages.

You should also set up as many band profile pages as you can - you can find a list of band profile and music networking sites here.

If you’re new to the world of website creation, then the easiest way to get yourself online is with a blog. There are a lot of sites where you can get a blog; I prefer WordPress because it’s free, versatile and there are loads of useful plugins available for it.

Wordpress comes in three basic flavours; if you don’t have your own hosting, then you should use Wordpress.com, which will host your blog for you. This is the easiest option, and recommended for beginners. All you have to do is set up an account and start blogging.

If you want to install Wordpress on your own hosting, you need to visit Wordpress.org, download the latest version, unzip it and then upload the files to your server via FTP. If you have Fantastico, you might be able to install Wordpress automatically from cPanel, so you should check that first.

The third form of Wordpress is called Wordpress MU, where MU stands for Multi-User. This allows you to set up a site where users can register and create their own blogs on your hosting. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here though - maybe I’ll come back to this one later on…

Why Should I Host My Own Blog?

Although a blog hosted on wordpress.com can be a valuable asset, if you want full control of your site then you should get your own hosting package. There are starter packages available from as little as a dollar a month, and any decent site will begin paying for itself within a very short time anyway (I’ll cover monetisation issues later on).

Having your own site means you can control exactly how it is structured, and how it looks. You can go into the style sheets, html and php to add, edit or modify anything you like. Although a wordpress.com blog is great for getting started, if you’re serious about developing a long-term web presence then you will quickly outgrow it.

How To Install Wordpress

As mentioned above, the typical way is to download the latest version and upload it to your server using an FTP client. Wordpress recommend using Filezilla, although you can use any FTP client; a useful alternative is Smart FTP.

I won’t go into the details of installation here, as there is a very clear guide to installation on the Wordpress site. If you run into problems during the installation, the support forums on the site usually provide an answer.

Before you can set up Wordpress, you need to set up a database that it can use. This is usually done from your hosting control panel, where you should see an icon or menu item for mySQL databases. You need to give this database a name, and create a user with all priveleges. This means that you can read/write/execute any file. Make a note of the database name, user name and password that you created.

Potential Problems: Wp-Config File

The installation requires that you enter your database information in the wp-config.php file. Remember not to leave any spaces inside the apostrophes.

The database name and user name will have an underscore in the middle, so that they appear in this format: ‘user1_mydatabase’, ‘user1_myusername’. Your actual information will be different, of course, but this is the structure you should follow.

Your password will be entered on its own, like this: ‘password’.

Some people encounter problems connecting to the database when they run ‘install.php’. If this is the case, the first thing to try is changing ‘localhost’ in the wp-config file.

Some hosting providers use a separate server for SQL databases, so if you have a look in your control panel you might be able to find out what that is. If you can’t find it, you can always ask them. Once you have this info, you replace ‘localhost’ in the wp-config file with the correct server name, probably in this format: ’sqlserver17.myhostingpackage.com’.

If this doesn’t solve your problem, then it’s time to hit the forum.

Potential Problems: File Permissions

At this stage, you probably have Wordpress installed correctly, and it looks like everything is working fine. However, if you go to the ‘Design’ menu and enter the Theme Editor, you might find that Wordpress won’t allow you to save any changes you make. This is because the Wordpress files are not writeable, so you need to change the file permissions to allow Wordpress to modify these files.

If you’re using cPanel, you can just click on a file or folder and select ‘permissions’. Here you can make the files writable; it’s faster if you apply changes to all files and sub-folders.

This process is also referred to as CHMOD, which stands for change mode. The highest level of access is 777, which means that all actions are allowed on that file or folder. As always, you can find plenty of help on the Wordpress site if you run into difficulty setting file permissions for your blog.

If you want to promote yourself as an artist nowadays, you need to have a presence on the Web. Simply having a MySpace page or even a dedicated website isn’t enough - you need to know how to effectively promote yourself online, how to drive traffic to your site, how to be found.

Linkdisco will provide advice on how to create a search-engine friendly site - something you can use as a promotional tool, and which helps you grow your fanbase.

I’ll also cover some basic SEO techniques, simple tips and tricks that will make it easier for your fans (and prospective fans) to find you online.

As time goes by, I’ll be adding any relevant info I discover that might be of particular interest to musicians; this will generally include stuff that is applicable to any website, but I’ll try and present it from an artist’s viewpoint whenever possible.