Getting the Most from Tags & Descriptions
It’s a well established fact that seach engine optimization, or SEO, is an important tool for building an online presence and attracting more traffic to your website. To learn more about SEO, see Dave Hahn’s Search Engine Optimization for Musicians. As he mentions, musicians needn’t be overly concerned with SEO on their own website if it’s for mostly promotional and informational purposes. This is very true, and the last thing a working musician needs is one more distraction from their instrument. However, the concepts are important to understand as you expand your internet presence because better optimization helps more people find your music. In this article, we’ll apply these concepts outside the musician’s website and into other online communities.
Most social networks have their own internal search functions or methods of organizing user profiles. Twitter is an excellent example of a site whose search engine helps not only connects people with common interests, but also allows virtual chat rooms to be created on the fly if every user tweets a common word (usually preceded by a # symbol). YouTube relies heavily on searches to help visitors dig through all the content, so precise, well thought out titles, descriptions and tags on your videos increase the chances of the right people discovering your videos. Both sites are destinations with built in communities, the perfect places for musicians to build awareness.
As a musician, you ought to be familiar with these sites and others like them. They are excellent promotional tools, free to use, and the philosophy behind this brand of strategic marketing will transfer to the next set of tools once these are obsolete. The trick is using them efficiently and not being overwhelmed by the vast number of websites people might tell you to join. I believe it’s better to find a few that work best for you, where most of your audience hangs out, and make the most out of your profile.
Before You Start
What is your message? How do people describe you or your music? Come up with a few general words or phrases that accurately describe you, your music, and each of your albums. If you have some descriptions prepared, you’ll waste less time setting up new profiles and uploading new content. A little repetition also helps people start to recognize you.
Most importantly, be really, really good. Make sure people are impressed when they stumble across your content. Just getting somebody’s attention today is hard enough, so be ready when they do give you some of their time.
Best Practices for Tags & Descriptions
Write out your full name, the band members’ full names, and the band’s name as often as possible. Use pronouns sparingly, only enough to avoid sounding like a broken record. Search engines interpret repetition as importance, and what’s more important than the name of your band?
If your name is common, set yourself apart. Since I’ve already mentioned him, let me use Dave Hahn as an example. It is almost hard to believe how many people named Dave Hahn are on the internet. There’s a rock climber, at least two other musicians, an illustrator, and a guy that made a nuclear bomb out of smoke detectors. To set himself apart, Dave uses his full name with his middle initial, David J. Hahn, and relies on keywords that are unique to him, such as “piano, conducting, keyboards.”
Always link to your website. Every profile, post, or comment you make anywhere online should link back to your website. If you’re able to created embedded links, incorporate keywords into the linked phrase. For example, instead of just using his name, Dave should use something like “pianist David J. Hahn” so search engines index the keyword alongside his name. Building a web presence is much more effective if you are funneling traffic to a central location. Search engines also follow links to help determine the importance of websites. The more links headed to your website, the better. Don’t expect everyone to take the link every time, but make sure it’s available and works. This leads us to the next point.
Write out full URLs, starting with “http://”. If you use the full web address, many sites including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook will automatically convert it into a link. The advantages here are obvious.
Write out the name of the venue and location of your gigs every time you announce the shows, blog about them, or post videos or pictures at the venue. For some reason, a lot of clubs have terrible SEO for their own websites, and it’s not that hard to show up in the search results by simply listing their name on your site. More importantly, the venues you play put your music in context for people, so it doesn’t hurt for your name to show up in the search listing, even if they weren’t looking for you.
Find the best phrases and tags using Google’s Keyword Tool. For example, you may want to describe yourself as an “indie rock band” but when you plug that phrase into the keyword tool you’ll learn that the phrase “indie band” is searched 90,000 time each month, compared to only 9,000 for “indie rock band.”
Talk about your stuff. As a guitarist, I try to write “Fender Telecaster” or “1967 Gibson ES-175″ in place of “my guitar” when appropriate. Not only are your fans curious about what you use, but people search for gear all the time. Sometimes this is all the common ground you need to find a new fan.
Use tags to reinforce the rest of your content, but don’t rely on them. Tags are more effective when used to add one more instance of a keyword from the title or body of your content.
Pictures are not worth a thousand words. Banners and logos are great, but don’t rely on them to tell the world who you are online. Search engines can’t index the words on the image. Make sure important words appear as text somewhere near the top of the site.
Think like the person performing the search. When you use a search engine, you try to pick out the important words for whatever it is you’re looking for. This is common sense, but pretend you are looking for exactly whatever it is you are posting to the internet, and make sure those words are present in your description and tags. Use proper spelling and avoid all those internet abbreviations and slang. Although your audience might know what you’re talking about, they probably don’t search for those terms very often and search engines don’t index them very well.
To be honest, this is all a relatively small piece of the puzzle. I don’t think there has ever been a musician that broke through the noise because of their YouTube tags, and I doubt it’s held anyone back. However, I don’t believe it is trivial. Thinking this way will make your time online much more effective, and then you can spend more time making music.
About the author
Man, there’s a lot of trash advice out there on this topic, so I was pleasantly surprised — this was damn solid! Well written and presented, too…had to give props. Thanks for putting in the time to do it right.
7/21/2009
Wow, I never really thought about my using “Christopher Davis” on all my websites and recital programs, I just though it made me look official. But it helps set my name apart from the short Chris Davis.
Really nice article, Cameron.
7/21/2009
Thanks for the mention Cam. This is another well-thought, definitive article on an often overlooked detail of the modern musician career. Thanks again!
7/28/2009
Really strong advice on the topic! As you said, observing these tips won’t necessarily set a musician ahead of the pack, but it certainly can’t hurt. Google’s keyword tool seems like a smart way to get a few extra hits here and there, and you really can never be too clear when describing a video on Youtube.
10/25/2009
Thanks this article was very helpful since I am currently trying to redo my website to get more hits when you search for it in google
10/26/2009
Thank you for the tips. I have recently started thinking about creating a website and having more of a web presence so this and many of musician wages’ other articles have been very helpful.
10/26/2009
This is excellent. I don’t think many people would take a concept like this fully into consideration. Anyone can have web presence, but using SEO will definitely boost traffic and have a positive impact on web presence. Thanks so much!
11/2/2009
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