You’ve created your artist website and it looks great, plus it’s full of awesome content thanks to your great music and videos. Now you just need people to discover and visit it. This is where SEO, or search engine optimization, comes into play. While this subject can get pretty technical, there are some fairly simple things you can do to improve your artist website’s SEO without being a computer geek.
So check out these simple SEO tips below on how to attract more people to your musician website.
Your Blog
Most website platforms include a free blog feature, but more often than not artists will opt to put all of their focus into their music while their blog collects dust. Obviously your music is very important, but keeping your blog up to date and full of content is a great way to attract new visitors to your site and should not be ignored.
The trick is creating posts with titles that will show up in people’s searches. To do this, you have to start with the end-user in mind and consider what search terms they might be using, remembering that they don’t necessarily know who you are yet. So if you’re a soul artist based out of Boston, you might write some posts like ‘Soul Music in Boston’ and ‘Best Boston Venues to Hear Live Soul Music.’ Then, anyone searching those terms will in theory end up on your website and learn about you as an artist. Here’s an article we wrote a while back where we listed several blog post ideas for generating website traffic.
+ Watch: Best Music Promotion Secret Nobody’s Talking About
Include links to your website on other sites
The more backlinks there are on the internet directed towards your website, the more that helps with the algorithm that determines where your page lands in searches. There are lots of different ways to get links to your site out there. A natural one is through all of your social media pages, including facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. Wherever there’s an opportunity to include links do it, like in your profile and about pages, whenever you add an event, and it doesn’t hurt to include links in your daily posts fairly often as well. Youtube is another social media site that offers great opportunities for back links and you always want to include links to your site in your video descriptions.
You also want to get links to your website on other sites as well. Promoting your music and your upcoming shows opens up a great opportunity to plant backlinks. If you’re using online booking platforms like Indie on the Move, ReverbNation, or ShowSlinger to secure shows, make sure you include links to your site on your profile pages. Whenever venues mention an upcoming show of yours on their websites or social media pages, encourage them to include a link to your site as well. Also, submitting your events to various online calendars is a great way to not only promote your shows and get more people to them, but to also get more links to your site out there. Also, whenever your feature on other sites like online newsletters, blogs, or interviews and music features, make sure they include links to your site.
+ Read: 15 Online Platforms Musicians Can Use To Book Paid Gigs
Link to other websites with relevant content
On the surface, it seems counter-productive to send visitors on your page to other sites, but this actually can improve the SEO of your own site. Having lots of relevant outbound links enhances the quality of your site immensely as it shows that you’re giving your visitors access to more resources. This can be done quite naturally by including links to venue’s sites that you perform at, as well as online publications that have featured you. After that you can start to get creative and include links to other relevant sites as well.
Other Factors
There are lots of other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO as well. One is to use simple URL structure for your pags. While web addresses can sometimes get messy by default and include a bunch of random characters, a lot of platforms today allow you to simplify them and even sometimes manipulate them yourself. For instance, it’s much better to have your video page address be ‘https://coolartist.com/music-videos’ than to be ’https://coolartist.com/kypx765177009191’. The cleaner and easier it is to read your URLs, the more they will be able to assist in your site’s SEO.
Image keywords is another factor that plays into your site’s SEO. Every image that you include on your site should have keywords embedded in them, like ‘Boston_Soul_Music.’ That way, when people search for that, your images will pop up and if any of them catch that persons eye, it will lead them to your site.
Another important factor is Meta Data. Most platforms today allow you as the author to plug in meta data for every page. This is easy to ignore as it seems overly technical, but it’s actually extremely important when it comes to behind the scenes information that bots use to determine what sites to include in search results. So definitely challenge yourself to fill that information in.
So as you can see, SEO doesn’t have to be rocket science. It can actually be quite simple and can naturally be embedded into your musician page. Try these tips and see if they help bring more people to your website.
If you’re looking to create your artist site, check out this great musician’s guide to websites from our friends at DIY Musician.
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The Musician’s Guide to Starting a Blog for Income
50 Blog Post Ideas for Musicians
SEO – Get Your Music on the First Page of Search Engines
This is great info! I concur that including a link to your website on social media platforms is a great way to gain popularity in search engines. You can dominate the first page of search engines like that when somebody types in your name. But having an active presence on YouTube along with proper link building (like including your links in all description boxes on all your videos) is key since YouTube and Google search engine are both owned by Google. One mistake I made when I first started out was that I had a WordPress blog to keep track of my blog posts that was separate from my official website. When I moved my blog to be hosted on my official website instead of a WordPress account, I saw major changes in site visits. The type of blog posts you do also makes a difference. Writing articles about your genre in your town is an excellent tip. Also, you may get a lot of traffic from simply covering the local music scene and giving tips on where to go for live music. Don’t forget to include your info and bio in all of your posts so you can get that added exposure when people do come to your site. Paying attention to this kind of stuff can make a big difference in getting free exposure and getting those paid local gigs. Thanks for all the great information Rob.
Thanks for the great comment, Anitra! Good point too about blogs. If your blog is on a separate platform from your website, that will be a huge missed opportunity to draw people to your site, so ideally their connected.