Does Your Band’s Website Pass the Test? (SEO Lesson 1)

This is the first lesson of several that will be posted over the upcoming days, so be sure to come back to find out what to do next!

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There are many fantastic tools and guides showing up on the web that are helping average people like us create really effective websites. It’s no longer out of reach for the ordinary internet user to get a healthy and consistent stream of traffic to their site. And it doesn’t cost money. You just have to know what you are doing and why you are doing it!

Yes, this is another post about the exhilerating world of search engine optimization! (I know it doesn’t sound creative, but it really can be)  Our mission is to share with you some practical advice that will help you share your creative vision with others.

Let’s get down to business:

Lesson 1:

SEO is not about money, magic, or tricks. So be wary of SEO businesses, magicians, and quick-fix devices.

1) I’d advise you to be extremely wary of businesses or software that claim to optimize your site for you. It may be an appealing easy solution: let someone else handle it. It’s very hard to tell who is legitimate out there, and their goals probably don’t align very well with yours. Their goal is usually simply to increase your traffic (short-term), not build your customers or fans (what you really want, long-term). Plus, they don’t know as much about how you want to portray yourself as you do.  So put your wallet back in your pocket. Buy yourself something pretty instead!

2) The most important SEO changes are changes you can pretty easily make yourself. Optimizing your website isn’t about any kind of magic or well-kept secret. Google makes their process pretty transparent and gives you some webmaster guidelines. You don’t have to necessarily understand everything they say right now, but the point is that the process is public and no one has any true “SEO secret weapon.” Do it yourself. If you’re scared, we’ll hold your hand along the way!

3) Be wary of advice that proposes a single strategy to take advantage of the way current search engines find your page. Tricks may give you a temporary spike in traffic, but (again) it does not mean that you are reaching the audience you want to reach (so really, what was the point?). The results will not be sustained once people have figured out you’ve essentially just lured them to your site.

I remember not too long ago the “trick” people were using was hiding thousands of keywords at the bottom of their webpages hoping to pull traffic from every possible search. We now know that that is ridiculous and actually hurts your page rank. But this is what thousands of people were doing and promoting! Basically, don’t try to fool the search engines.

A final point to note is that the algorithms and methods search engines use to rank sites are constantly being updated and modified, so if you base your SEO attempts on a trick, it will be soon be outdated. There are no SEO tricks, so put the magic set away and get real with your strategy.

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I hope I’ve done my job of convincing you that SEO is about strategy, not tricks. Alright! Now our heads are in the right place.  Stay tuned to find out where to go from here to make sure your website passes the test.