Get Your Fans To Your Website (S.E.O. 101)

This post is simply meant to be an introduction to search engine optimization (SEO) for artists. By no means is this a comprehensive explanation or analysis; it is simply a place to begin thinking. It’s important to understand the logic behind SEO before you begin trying to implement it.

For some reason, SEO sounds far more technical and complicated than it really is. It was probably coined by someone who wanted to make sure everyone else was too scared to even try it.

In my mind, SEO is not only about getting your page ranked highly in a google seach. It’s about creating a web experience that is enjoyable for your fans and profitable for you, the artist.

That cool tropical dart frog color scheme you chose for your MySpace page probably just sent several of your fans straight to the hospital.

And the crazy 4 minute intro animation you put as a splash page to your website either:

1. Wasted Someone’s Time
2. Crashed The Browser
3. Probably Both

Be simple.

If someone is interested enough to take their time to look at your website, the least you can do is make it easy for them. Be creative, not obnoxious.

When designing your site, keep in mind that search engines look for text and content. If you design a site in Flash, not only can’t users bookmark specific pages to come back to, search engines can’t SEE your animations and to them it looks like a pretty empty website.

Think a little bit like a marketer, and figure out how fans will try to find you. Google Analytics helps to solve that poblem and gives you the best information you can use to figure out how to tweak your site.

Google analytics can tell you where your visitors came from, how long they stayed, what page made them leave, what part of the world they are visiting from, what kind of computer they have, and much much more. Someday it might even be able to tell you what your visitors are wearing. Here’s hoping.

Google also provides some tools that help you experiment with different formats for your site. In their webmaster tool kit they even have an A/B feature which let’s you create two different layouts for a site. Google randomly picks one of the two to give to  users as they come and then keeps track of which one visitors stay on longer.

This is just scratching the surface. Whether you just remember to simply “tag” the content of your website or you want to play scientist and analyze 20 different graphs and charts, search engine optimization is essential.

Start learning about how to implement Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools into your site. Google is kind (and smart) enough to explain to you how they rank pages, and they give you tools to make it happen. Explanations about how to use these tools are on google, youtube, etc. If it still proves to be too much, tell your webmaster that you want these implemented into your website now.

Start searching around for hints. To start, here are 55 Quick SEO tips even your mother would love.

What kinds of SEO tools are you guys using? Leave some comments.

—Andrew Goodrich