Linkdisco: Internet Marketing for Musicians

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

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.