As an indie artist, you might be the sole person responsible for managing your website. Have you taken a look at your stats recently? Do you know where most of your web traffic is coming from, and what keywords or phrases brought fans to your site?

If not, now’s the time to take a look at your website analytics and learn a bit more about SEO. It will help improve your online presence and might even nab you a few new fans.

SEO Defined: Search engine optimization. It’s the process of improving the visibility of a website or page in a search engine’s natural search results. Basically, SEO helps drive traffic to your site by bringing you to the top of a user’s search results.

How does that work? Aside from the general magic of the Internet, one very big thing that helps improve SEO is tagging your content. All content management systems like WordPress now allow you to tag using specific words or phrases related to your content. If you haven’t been using them, you should. You should also use categories. What’s the difference, right?

Categories vs. Tags: Use them both. Categories should be the overarching category, and tag should be the more specific item within it. For example, a category would be “animals” and tags could be “dog,” “cat,” “horse,” “llama,” etc.

Tags allow you break down the content on your site more specifically than categories do, and using them both can help bring users and search engines to your website from various paths.

What tags? Not sure what words to use as tags? Think about words that describe your genre, geography, your name, your album title, and venues you frequently perform at. Remember to be consistent; if you begin calling your genre ‘indie rock’ and then change to ‘independent rock’, it won’t be as effective. Consistency is key.

Tell us what you think! Have you noticed that tagging your content has helped to drive traffic to your site?

The SongCast Crew