SEO Basics for Musicians - Part 1 - Meta Data

I've been through literally thousands and thousands of band profiles and musician websites and I've noticed a lot of things that could make their presence better. However, most of them are not SE (search engine) friendly, making it harder for fans of the genre to discover the artist(s).

First, if you're not doing so already, consider targeting your music to directly to the people who are fans of the genre; your 'niche'. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but for a lot of us it seems natural to present our music to as many people as possible. Don't let this fool you, though. Niche marketing/targeting is MUCH more effective. Instead of putting your music out on all the p2p networks hoping someone will discover you, try focusing on a much smaller group of hardcore fans of your genre. If anyone is going to care about your music, it will be the fans from this group. Obviously, you can't track down ever single fan, so it's best to optimize your site and profile pages for the search engines, so they can easily find you.

Now, there are many intricacies when optimizing a web page for the search engines, but here I'm going to give you the basics. Just following these simple suggestions will help your site/page rank higher in most search algorithms, as they change quite frequently. This is aimed at musicians, but really anyone can follow these tips.

Since these tips turned out to be WAY longer than I anticipated, I decided to break up these SEO tips into a couple posts.


Header Meta Data
If you have your own web site already, you or your webmaster should be able to control the header meta data. This is the most important part of SEO for any web page/site and probably the easiest, yet so many designers and developers leave this out or do it incorrectly.

Above, is a screen shot of the meta data area within your page's code. When a search engine spider crawls your site, this is more-or-less the first bit of information it will read. Based on this info, the SE spider will begin to categorize your site. Your title is considered most important, so it should be to the point and worded carefully. If your delta blues band was called, "Jimmy James & the Blue Flames"; you may word your title like, "Jimmy James & the Blue Flames - Down Home Delta Blues" It's pretty much a no-brainer, but definitely important.

Next in line is, the meta description (not keywords. they will be last). Again, it's fairly obvious what you should include here. However, you don't want to go crazy. Stick to one or two sentences describing your band and/or music. When writing your description, try to use as many of your keywords as possible while keeping it sensible. Also, be sure to include your act's name and genre. This will help the spiders compare to your title, so you want to keep the same topic.

Finally, your meta keywords. Why would keywords be last, you ask? It's of the least importance to SE spiders, but it's still needed. When a spider crawls the rest of your site, it will be able to understand the keywords just by the text, but we will cover that later. In your meta keywords, again you want to be sure to include your act's name and genres, as well as, anything else that's important to recognize your presence, but do NOT keyword 'stuff'. This means to repeat your keywords over and over, trying to gain advantage over other relevant web sites. The spiders WILL recognize this and penalize you, usually by dropping your rank, but sometimes a complete ban.

Unfortunately, on most profile pages you will not have control over this data. So you must make the best with what you do have control over. PLUGOLA has some built-in features that will automatically create some key meta data for you, upon profile creation.

Categories/Tags
One of the biggest mistakes I notice musicians making is not categorizing themselves by the correct genre. I know it's funny for a death metal band to classify themselves as "Chinese Pop", or vice-versa, but from a search/discovery standpoint, you're really doing yourself an injustice. When you're targeting a specialized fan base, you want to make it easy for them to find you. When the SE spider crawls your page, you want it to rank you in the search results for your genre, preferable on top. If you're in the wrong category, obviously genre fans will not be able to find you. I suggest you include your general genre (ie: rock, r&B, etc.) and your sub-genre (ie: crunk, nu-jazz, etc.). Be sure to include these same genres as keywords in your header meta info.

I'm sure you've been noticing more sites these days, using a 'tagging' feature for bookmarks, videos, photos, etc. I've always considered tags a sort of a cross between a 'category' and 'keyword'; an extra tool to note myself (and/or others) in a couple words what will be found upon clicking. Tagging your pages and content correctly is also essential in higher SE rankings.

Although these are only beginning steps to optimizing your profile page(s) and site, by following them you will already be ahead of most. They're also stepping stones to more SEO tips that will have you ranking higher no time, such as; revalency and link popularity. But I'll get to that in the next post.

How to plug your music on Twitter

First, I should say, if you're not yet using Twitter to network with your fans and to promote yourself, you should sign-up and see what it can do for you. I didn't get it at first, either. I would think to myself, "So, what's the big deal?" I read an article suggesting to embrace Twitter in order to understand it. I embraced it and learned what a powerful networking tool it really is, and with a lot of potential to be so much more. Now, I'm not going to explain the basics of Twitter since there are already about a million articles out there on that topic, but I am going to explain a neat little service that you can combine with PLUGOLA's coupon system to market your music.

One of the cool things about twitter is that it has an open API, which basically means developers and tech geeks have free range to build whatever service they would like around Twitter's service. It seems almost daily a new Twitter (App) Application is introduced. Some of them are very useful while others are just for fun. One such useful and FREE app PLUGOLA musicians can use is, TwtQpon, which is a coupon/discount tool that can be distributed to your fans and followers on Twitter. Let me explain how you can make this work to market your music.

One of PLUGOLA's many features is offering it's musicians the option to make selected tracks available for free download. After one or more tracks are selected for "Promo", each musician is given their own coupon code. Once this coupon code is redeemed by one of your fans, your promo tracks will be available for free download to them. I go into further detail about our coupon system HERE. So, once you have your coupon code from PLUGOLA, head over to TwtQpon and enter the required info including your coupon code, the link to the sign-up page, customize the text and any images, click on the "create" button and voila! You have your own online marketing system ready to be announced to your fans on Twitter.

I purposely left out the nitty-gritty details about marketing your music, because that is completely up to you. If you're not sure where to begin; start-off with selecting one or two of your stronger pieces, or perhaps one with most mass appeal, and offer that/those tracks as "Promo" or free. Think of it as giving your fans a sample of what they will get if they decide to purchase/download more of your tracks, or even what they can expect when you play live.

Remember, you can use your PLUGOLA coupon code to promote your tunes, anywhere. I just thought this would be a fun and easy way to try it out. Be sure to follow PLUGOLA on Twitter. We can be found @ Twitter.com/plugola

'Plugging' and Sharing Your Favorites

One of the stand-out features of PLUGOLA is that artists can allow their fans to re-sell their music for a commission of the artists' choice. We call this, "Plugging". The concept behind this is to encourage fans to continue sharing the music they love by offering financial incentives, while in a controlled environment for the artist.

If you discover a great, new artist and you want to share a few of their tunes with your buddies; instead of just handing over their MP3s, why not ask those buddies to pitch-in and support the artist? Plus, you are to earn a commission, set by the artist, for every download you generate. If you buddies like those tunes, too, then they can turn around and share them the same way.


After you have downloaded your favorite track(s), you must login to your "Account". This is a double-login for security purposes. Not all artists allow their music to be plugged, but if they do you will see the "Plug" button in your downloads manager. By clicking on the "Plug" button, this will automatically send a "plug request" to the artist. In it's place it will say "Approval Pending". Once the artist approves this request, you will receive an approval message and it will automatically appear in your media player manager. If you decide you no longer want to plug a particular track, you can either click on 'disable' in your media player manager, or of course, you can always delete the track from your account completely. Just be sure to save the track to your computer before you delete it from your Account.

As an artist on PLUGOLA, you have the option to allow your music to be 'plugged' by your fans. If you decide to allow your fans as affiliates, all you must do is login to your 'Account' and select "Yes" next to each or any track you want to make available for plugging. Anytime one of your fans downloads those songs set to "yes", there will be an automatic option for them to choose or not. If a fan decides to plug any of your tracks, you will receive a request message to 'Approve' or 'Disapprove'. To a fan, a disapproval will result in their account saying the track(s) are "Not Available" for plugging.

By default, all affiliate commissions are set at %5 of artist earnings, per track. However, artists are free to change this percentage to whatever they would like at any time they want.

We believe this is a great interactive way for artists and fans to build relationships and work together with a common goal in mind, while everyone benefits.

Music Videos for the Indie Artist

These days it's becoming more and more important for independent artists to have their own music video(s). It wasn't until recent years that having a produced video to promote your music did indie artists much good, besides maybe for the late Sunday night cable access viewers; much less affordable without some sort of record label money behind you. As I'm sure you already know, all that has changed. Technology has allowed us to cheaply and easily(somewhat) shoot, produce and distribute your music videos to thousands of potential fans.

Over at KnowTheMusicBiz.com, Caroline Bottomley posted a good article on some good ways to get started putting together your own music video. Read her article HERE.

Giving Away Music for Free

I was asked by a musician the other day, after he took a look at PLUGOLA (www.plugo.la), "What do you think about musicians giving their music away for free?" I was a bit surprised by the question, at first. I mean, I know a handful of major acts, like, NIN and Radiohead, have found some success in giving away their music for free or letting their fans set their own price. And that's a terrific idea for these international acts to give back to the fans who support them. It's no doubt a move like that would boost their popularity and fan support. But would independent, DIY musicians benefit the same way?

Andrew Dubber, of NewMusicStrategies.com, claims an indie musician should give their music away for free to the millions, in order to attract a few thousand fans. His reason is because people crave it. Well, who doesn't want something for free, right? I know a few thousand fans sounds like a lot, and I'm sure you wouldn't deny them, but in reality that's a HORRIBLE return. If you want to spread your music by giving away free mp3s, a targeted marketing plan would bring you a much better return and much more dedicated fans. A few thousand fair-weather fans is great, but a hundred hardcore fans is better. It's your hardcore fans that will be the people telling their friends about you, buying your music/merchandise and going to your shows; while it's your fair-weather fans that will be downloading your free mp3s only.

Targeting your audience is far more effective for the long term success of your brand and earning potential. For example; if you were in a heavy metal band, giving away your free music to anyone else BUT heavy metal fans would probably not do much for your advancement. You want the type of fans that want more of you and will continue to seek and follow you. Cameron Mizell, of MusicianWages.com, has the right idea in the article on how to effectively promote your own music on Itunes.

...take a very narrow aim at a specific group of people, you’re going to find dedicated fans. This is the complete opposite of trying to get as much radio play as possible, or taking out an ad in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Instead of trying to convert 0.5% of thousands or millions of people by throwing spaghetti on the wall, I’m trying to get a 50% conversion of 50 people, many times over by catering to their tastes. Those people are excited to discover my music and word spreads organically.

Even more so in the digital age, these are how people will find you online. Search engines, online directories, indexes, etc. all use the the basic algorithm of categorizing web sites/pages based on keywords or key subjects (genre, brand), so interested surfers are directed to the right place. You want to be at the top of these lists, so you must target your audience and show them the way to your music. When they arrive, give them a free taste of what they're looking for. If a potential new fan doesn't want to purchase anything from you today, be sure to give them a way to bookmark or remember how to find you in the future. Perhaps THIS is when a free download or two is in order.

These days there are so many online promotional opportunities for independent musicians it's almost overwhelming, I know. But with a little homework, you can learn which tools are available online and which will work best for you, and put together your own marketing campaign. Better yet, you can do it all for free without having to necessarily give away your music for free. Your time, effort and talent is worth something.

EDIT: Artist House Music explores deeper and suggests price points for your music.