SEO for bands: to improve your visibility in search engines

Scratching my beardy locks and peering through smudgy glasses, I thought through a problem I’d pondered since forming my band three years earlier: how to sell my music online. A quick Google search led me to an acronym I’d encountered before but had never quite understood: SEO, the layman’s term for search engine optimization.

“What is SEO?” I asked myself, puzzled. “And how did I catch it?”

Just kidding, sports fans – I mean, indie artists: SEO is not this season’s scariest superbug. Search engine optimization is the strategic manipulation of a website or a blog to improve its rankings in search results. So, for example, if a music lover searches Bing for “new indie pop band,” your optimized website would theoretically appear in the first three or five search results instead of buried on the ninth page where nobody’s going to find you.

I realized the first step of how to sell my music online is to make it easier for the masses to find my website and hear my music. And better yet – it’s totally free! You can make simple changes to your website without having to pay for advertising. But, unfortunately, SEO is not an exact science. SEO’s best practices change pretty frequently, as Google fine-tunes its search algorithm every few weeks.

For advice straight from the horse’s mouth, check out this SEO Starter Guide published by Google. It includes recommendations like creating unique page titles for all of your website pages, including description meta tags on every page, and creating a technically organized and easy-to-navigate website. Generally speaking, the easier it is to use your website, the more Google will reward you with high rankings.

Take advantage of tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to learn more about how your audience utilizes your website and how you can create a technically and contextually optimized experience for your listener. And as always, when in doubt, check back here at the SongCast blog to learn more about any Google updates affecting indie artists.

Happy SEOing!