Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 2
This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.
In Part 1, we looked at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is, we examined the differences between organic and paid search results and we looked at how to make sure the pages of your website are optimized. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, do that first.
Now you think your site structure is acceptable, how do you get the indexing by a search engine started? The best way for this is to create a Google webmaster account (this is really easy if you already have a Gmail account) and register your website through the webmaster tools by placing a verification code in your website header. The webmaster tool will allow you to upload an XML sitemap into the system, helping your site to get indexed faster and easier. There are plenty of sites where you can enter your URL and those sites will create the XML sitemap. I’ve found that http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ works quite well.
In the Google webmaster tools you will also find a section for inserting / creating a robot.txt file. In this file you can specify which folders should be accessed by the search engine spider. Say you have a folder containing some images that you use for your website layout. The last thing you want is to have these images show up in a Google image search. That’s why you should protect this folder and disallow the spider access to it.
Now you know the structure of your site is good, but for which keywords and/or keyword phrases do you want to appear on the SERPs?
I found it best to always select a primary and secondary keyword phrase, and make sure these appear in the meta tags (keyword and description), page copy, title tags and file name / URL as much as possible. Remember, the higher in the page that your keyword phrases occur in your body text, the better.
In your HTML header section, you have the possibility to insert a meta-description and keywords. The meta-description has to describe in short what the visitor can find on this page. This will be displayed under the link on the SERP (see figure 1) and ideally should not contain over 160 characters. Make sure the primary and secondary keyword phrases are present in this description. In the keyword section you can enter as many keywords as desired, separated by commas, but ideally you do not want more than 7-8 keyword phrases in there. Make sure each page has a different set of keyword phrases and meta-descriptions, as each page clearly contains different information.
Figure 1: Meta description
Another effective step to directing relevant traffic to your site is linking. Having other websites with topics relevant to yours link to your website does half the work for you. Why? Simple, you already know that these visitors are relevant (they are coming from a site with a relevant topic remember?), thus increasing the chance for a goal conversion (either selling a product through your website or having people complete a contact form) dramatically. Having other sites link to your site also increases your ranking on the Search Engine Results Page, as your site will be associated with the keyword phrases displayed on the website linking to your site. Careful, make sure the link displays on relevant topic pages. If the Google spider decides this is not the case, this might negatively affect your ranking or might even result in your website not appearing at all in the search results (more on that later).
That’s it for Part 2. In Part 3, we’ll be looking at some of the more unconventional techniques for increasing your search ranking.
Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 1
This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.
In this blog I will focus over the course of the coming weeks on increasing traffic coming from search engines, and then more precisely the traffic coming from organic Search Engine Results Pages (or SERP). I will try to shed some light onto how to easily improve your Organic Search Results Ranking, the process also known as Organic SEO. Did I lose you already? No worries, let’s just start from the top.
What is SEO? Wikipedia tells us the following about Organic SEO:
“the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”
Figure 1: Search Engine Market Share
Ok, unpaid search results, that sounds good. Now which search engine should I optimize for? Which ones are available on the market and does my target market play a role in this? The figure on the right gives you a good idea of the key players in the Search Engine market. Agreed, if you live in the UK you might be thinking to yourself “AOL…yeah right!”, but if you wish to target the US market as well, then the relevance of AOL certainly comes into play. Concentrating on the UK market here, it is fair to say that Google is the main player, so I will focus my attention on that particular search engine.
Now, when I do a search in Google, I get a page with many different sections. Which section am I aiming to get top rankings in? What is Paid search and what is Organic? In figure 2, organic search is shown in the green colour, and makes up the largest area in the search results. The other areas are called “Sponsored links” and the rankings are determined by bidding on keywords.
Figure 2: Organic vs. Paid Search Results
So what influences the ranking of your website for a certain search term? Google has never disclosed any exact algorithm that is used to prevent incorrect use of it, but besides tips listed hereunder, I would say the key in all of this is RELEVANCY.
A first step in achieving SEO is actually tracking your site performance. To do this, register on Google and go to the Analytics section to register your site. You will be asked to place some tracking code in your website, so you will need access to your website code. This tracking will make it possible to analyse your site and see where your visitors come from and through which source (direct, referring site or through a search engine).
Now then, let’s see some factors that influence the ranking of your site and how to optimise those.
A good starting point in my opinion is always to make sure your (X)HTML structure is good. This starts with validating your pages (not just the home page!) and CSS file. This can easily be done by using an online tool for XHTML or CSS validating. A quick search gave me this as a place where I can do this http://validator.w3.org/. Validation can for instance tell you if you have an image in your site that does not have the ‘alt’ property set. A meaningful ‘alt’ and ‘title’ property on an image can aid your image in showing up in the Google image search results.
A validated XHTML file doesn’t necessarily mean its structure is correct. Make sure each page has a different title and make sure that the title is relevant to what that page displays. A proper header hierarchy is also a must (only 1 <h1> tag, following tags have to be h2 and subsections of that h3 etc).
Figure 3: Proper header hierarchy
Good formed links always improves the visitor experience and affects search engine spiders in a positive way. The same can be said for the URL’s to your pages. A lot of dynamic sites might use a URL structure such as http://www.example.com/index.php?pageid=8. Unfortunately this URL does not give the visitor any information on what he/she might find at this location. It is better to use user friendly URL’s such as http://www.example.com/what-we-do.php, where the URL clearly indicates what that page will be about. The trend is to replace any spaces in the URL name by dashes.
Ok, that’s it for today. In the next installment, we’ll be looking at how to get your pages indexed by the search engines and how to get your keywords right.
Digital Training Day in Derby
As some of you may be aware, we run a digital training day on behalf of AIM (Association of Independent Music) in London about once every three months. Well, for those of you who live a bit too far north to make it to London, we will now be running a condensed version of this course in Derby, in association with AIM and CIN (Creative Industries Network). So if you’re in the area you should definitely check it out. Here’s a flyer with the details:
Twitter Profile Design
If you are an artist, or you represent an artist, you are probably using Twitter to communicate with fans. If you’re not, give yourself a slap and then go and register. Go on, we’ll wait… Done it? Ok.
While Twitter does not allow as much flexibility design-wise as, say, MySpace, you do have the option to upload your own background image. You should be making the most of this by creating a background that mirrors the design of your website, MySpace profile, YouTube channel, etc, to ensure that you have a consistent design across all platforms through which people might discover your music.
So to get you started, here’s an article featuring some basic guidelines as well as plenty of inspiration in the form of examples of what other people have done with their Twitter backgrounds – http://bit.ly/dzCe4h
Also, here’s an article listing 10 great tools for creating Twitter backgrounds that you may find useful – http://bit.ly/a5fvqx
So now you have no excuse for sticking with that plain old standard Twitter background!
Digital Music Marketing Is Boring
Over the last few years digital campaigns for new albums and releases have had increased budgets, more time and a much bigger place in the overall marketing mix.
The work done by a digital department or independent company has come to be seen as crucial to driving sales and creating engagement. In fact the digital presence of an artist is now more sought-after than the actual quality of the music itself. A&R people will ask how many email addresses on the mailing list and if there has been a video that has ‘gone viral’. These are the stand-out indicators of the likely success of an album now.
Despite digital having this increased importance and there being a greater understanding of how to use it, campaigns are mostly dull and boring carbon-copies of the same idea.
If you walk into any marketing meeting at any mid to large record label you can guarantee to hear that the plan for ‘digital’ involves a free download, a remix competition and a stream of the album. The record will be pre-ordered with some sort of exclusive content and iTunes will have two bonus tracks that the artist didn’t deem good enough for the album itself.
It’s all perfectly well and good, but boy is it dull. With the opportunity to reach an unlimited audience, a starting point of great artwork, songs and lyrics to spark the creative juices and with pre-existing fans, why the heck is it like this?
Why do artists put up with having spent months in a studio tweaking every sound and laying down hours of different takes to get their musical expression correct and then have their marketing be a remix competition and giving away a free track.
I’m not saying that we have all the answers and can do this on every campaign, but it is up to us and the marketing departments at all labels to use digital creatively and not just go through the same motions on every record.
How To Change your Myspace URL
Changing a myspace url used to be impossible, but thanks to the addition of Myspace email, there is (as of writing) one opportunity to do so. This only works if your account was opened before August 2009.
If you’ve changed artist name, or want to bring your myspace url into line with your new website url etc than here is how you do it:
Login in to your Myspace account
When logged in click on ‘Mail’ on the top navigation
Once the mail page loads you should see a line of red text in the top right-hand corner which says, “set-up your own Myspace email address” (or similar text). Click this.
This will take you to the first page of setting up your new email account. You will be able to input what you want to be your email @myspace.com. By changing what comes before @myspace.com for your new email address this also changes your url to that text too.
So if I input my new myspace email as davidriley@myspace.com, assuming its available, my Myspace url would also become www.myspace.com/davidriley
This can only be done once so make sure you double check that you’ve written in the right text.
Simply go through the rest of the set-up of the email and your url will have been changed for good.
From there remember to update the links on your other websites etc to point to this new url.
Examples of artist websites built on WordPress
WordPress is one of the more common Content Management Systems that is used to build artist websites. It has become synonymous with blogging and is known for the ease of access and use.
Here is a quick list of some artist and label websites that are built using wordpress to give you an idea of what can be made:
Beck
www.beck.com
Dizzee Rascal
www.dizzeerascal.co.uk
Drift Records
www.driftrecords.co.uk
Gallows
www.gallows.co.uk
Gilles Peterson / Brownswood Recordings
www.gillespetersonworldwide.com
Hot Chip
hotchip.co.uk
Jaguar Love
takebacktheradworld.com
Maximo Park (artist)
www.maximopark.com
Patrick Wolf (artist)
www.patrickwolf.com
Party Dark (artist)
www.partydark.co.uk
Röyksopp
http://royksopp.com
Tinie Tempah (artist)
www.tinietempah.com
Please share other WordPress artist/label websites that you like or dislike in the comments below.
Stephen Fry on Twitter, music piracy and the web in 2010
Stephen Fry talks to .NET magazine about Twitter, offers his thoughts on music piracy and reveals what he thinks the web has in store for 2010. As always with Mr Fry, an interesting watch: http://www.netmag.co.uk/fry/ (requires the Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin)
We Are Hiring!
Good Lizard Media are looking to expand.
We’ve spent six months setting ourselves up as a credible and creative digital marketing company, working on campaigns with Ninja Tune, Skint, R&S Records, Brille, Essential Music and many other fine artists and companies. There comes a point however when in order to continue to fulfill on a robust digital campaign – from the basics to the remarkable – we need to devote even more time and attention to campaigns. To that end we require another digital marketing manager to work alongside Pete and myself to manage, implement and plan campaigns.
The ideal candidate will have experience of managing digital music campaigns in a label or management environment as well as confidence in their own opinions and convictions with the knowledge and experience to back it up.
Candidates without the above but who are creative, have a willingness to not follow the rules and generally go against the grain will also be strongly considered.
Send us an email and tell us about yourself and attach a CV for all the other boring stuff.
Jobs@goodlizardmedia.com
Creating Video Content
Video content is a brilliant way for an artist to engage themselves with their audience. Enabling the artist to speak directly to their fans and to be more creative and insightful than is possible with just text…
This is a quick blog to take you through some of the different ways you can create and use video content:
Susan Boyle – Answers Fans’ Questions:
Here we see Susan Boyle answering questions that are sent in by her fans.
There have been 30 to 40 of these videos posted online over about a 4 to 5 week period. The footage has obviously all been shot in one go, with someone asking her each question in turn. The video has then been edited down into individual questions, lasting between 15 and 45 seconds. The person asking the question has been replaced with a static frame of the questions text itself.
This is a great example of making the most of the limited time that the artist has to create content. By planning the content and questions in advance the artist has been able to spend 45 minutes in front of camera and in turn created over a month’s worth of regularly update video content.
By asking the fans to send their own questions in, it looks like Susan cares about her fans and is willing to actually converse with them.
Manchester Orchestra – Video Podcast
This is a 7 minute video featuring a mixture of behind the scenes, artful footage and live video.
This video is not only up on the bands Youtube channel but is also available as a video podcast series from the iTunes music store for free. This video podcast series is updated roughly once a month.
The footage has been carefully and creatively edited. In comparison to the Susan Boyle footage above for example, this has taken much longer to bring together. Hence we see that these videos are only released about once a month.
Where the Susan Boyle footage is more about informing and updating fans, this video content is much more an extension of the bands own creative output. These videos form part of the Manchester Orchestra experience, both in the effort that has gone into the editing process, the featuring of good quality live video and the access to the artist behind the scenes.
Master Shortie – Quick update
Master Shortie goes into HMV and buys his new album. The footage is intended as a call-to-arms for his fans to go out and buy his new album.
This artist uses video regularly, partly we would assume because of the young demographic of his fanbase. In order to keep turning out content quickly there is very little editing involved in this video, with just three or four cuts in the whole video. The camera work is very rough and the audio quality isn’t particularly good either, but this actually works to the benefit of the content. It appears the video is being made by a friend of Master Shortie and is akin to the sort of video content young people take of each other when out and about. By having the video content like this, it is both quick to get up online and relates to the audience arguably better than well filmed high quality video would.
In order to get the required video footage done in a short time like this and with only a few cuts necessary, there needs to be some good planning beforehand. The artist needs to know what topics need to be covered and to be aware of any important information and dates that need to be included in their performance.
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These three different methods of creating video content are all quite different, but this does not mean that an artist could not use all three. The most important questions when getting video content created are:
What is the artist comfortable doing?
What do you want to achieve with the content?
How soon does it need to be up online?
By answering these questions and planning the content you want to create, you can use any of the three examples of different content creation above or any other creative ways to film fantastic and engaging video content.
