Band Marketing and SEO

Bands and music groups spend a great deal of time, effort, and expense to market themselves. Businesses have embraced Search Engine Optimization as a way to increase brand awareness and boost sales. Since your band IS your business, SEO can be a great marketing tool.

Your band is your business. As with any business, facilitating brand awareness is a key objective in sales and marketing. The business world has embraced Search Engine Optimization as a way to do just that. Search Engine Optimization, as the name implies, is a series of procedures which are designed to place a business' website at the top of the search results when a person searches for that particular business on the web. The goal is to be the first listed result, or, at the very least, on the first page of results.

Of course, SEO is most useful if you have a website. In fact, it is very difficult without one. With the advent of MySpace, bands can have a web presence without an actual site of their own. Many bands use MySpace, Facebook, and other social media sites as a supplemental web presence designed to bolster their SEO efforts. For the purposes of this article, we will assume that you have a website.

As we mentioned above, there are a certain procedures and "tricks" which can increase your website's rankings on search engines. Here are some Do's and Don'ts to optimize your website:

DO...
Fill the pages on your site with good content and keywords. Keywords are the words that you think people will use to search for your band. Above all, make sure your keywords are pertinent to your content.

DON'T...
Keyword Spam. Make sure that you don't fill your pages with keywords and neglect content. This technique will actually hurt your search ranking. Google punishes this behavior by lowering rankings.

DO...
Create content-rich pages of text. Search engines compile rankings by searching through text on the web pages.

DON'T...
Create sites exclusively of Flash or images. While these components are useful and eye-catching, search engines cannot make sense of image-only or flash-only websites. When using images, use them in conjunction with "Alt Text", which assigns a textual title to the image which search engines can read.

DO...
Gain as many links to your website as possible. Leave comments on other websites, blogs, forums, or social media containing a link to your band's website.

DON'T...
Comment spam. When leaving a comment on a blog, forum, etc., try to be as useful possible. Don't just write "Nice post. See my band's website," or something along those lines. Try to write something relevant to the post. For instance, tell how that particular post is meaningful to you, offer other ideas relevant to the post, or otherwise contribute to the virtual conversation in a meaningful way.

As you're building your band's website, keep these simple principles in mind. You'll find that your search engine rankings will improve, which will help take your band's presence to the next level.