Does Your Band’s Website Pass the Test? (SEO Lesson 2)

Last week we began our first installment in a series about search engine optimization for musicians. Our goal is to guide you past the myths surrounding SEO, and to help you start making small steps towards big results. Last time we talked about what SEO isn’t; in this post I’m adament about telling you what SEO is. Next time, we’ll begin making some actionable steps forward. Stay tuned.

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Lesson 2:

Content is king.

I realize this might seem like one of those self-evident truths like “love is all you need” or “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” But clichés are usually clichés because they are true, and in order to really drive traffic to your band’s website, it’s utterly important that you understand why content is king. It’s pretty simple.

1. Search Engines Love Good Content.
2. People Love Good Content.

So, give ‘em what they want!

Think about it. Search engines necessarily need to send people to good websites for their business models to survive. If they throw a couple of sketchy sites at you, it won’t be long before you try another more reliable service. It’s always in a search engine’s best interest to send its users the best information it can possibly find for the respective search queries. Likewise, it’s always in a search engine’s best interest to discover the sites that suck (i.e. the ones trying to use lame tricks to misdirect traffic to their websites), so that those sites will never have a chance of appearing on search results.

Good content can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people. So this involves you determining what it is your audience really wants from you.

Whether you are a musician or an vacuum cleaner retailer, provide your customers with content. It’s not enough to list your services and products.

Since all of you reading this blog are interested in the music industry somehow, most of you will find it incredibly beneficial to maintain a blog to the best of your ability. Don’t know what to write about? You probably don’t need to tell us about the 7-grain toast you had this morning (or maybe you do, if that is what you are all about). Just write about what you know. Write about the things you get passionate about. And just keeping writing about it. It doesn’t matter how niche your passions are; in the world of the long tail you have an audience - you just need to connect with them.

Here at Artists House we are passionate about helping musicians build careers. Everything we do is to try to help the small guys do big things. So we are building communities around it. We write about it, we tweet about it, we basically breathe it. And that brought you here somehow.

The point is, you need to create something of value for your customers or fans. Search engines look for valuable content, and they simply ignore the rest.

Why am I spending an entire post rambling on about content and not giving you more actionable tips for optimized html and so on? Simple.

No amount of search engine optimization will help you if you don’t have searchable content.

I truly believe this is where optimization failure begins. So if you are a musician maintaining a website, listing your gigs and posting some music really isn’t enough. You need to have a blog, you need to have a forum, you need to create more value for your fans. You need to create more value for your search engines.