Having your own website is a great way to promote your music online. However, once you’ve launched your site, you will need to find ways to attract visitors to your site. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Get other sites to link to you

It may sound obvious, but one of the best ways for people to find you is through other sites linking to you. There are several online music directories that will list you for free and include a link to your website. For example, if you live in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, you can get a free listing in the Minnesota Music Directory (they also have paid listings).

Include your website address on printed materials

Be sure to include your website address on all of your printed materials, such as business cards, letters, flyers, etc. If you’re interviewed by a newspaper or magazine, ask that they include your website address in the final printed article.

Search engines

Another way that people can find your site is through search engines. Most search engines allow you to submit your site for inclusion in their search index (if you’re not already included). However, it may take a while before your site shows up in the index, so try to be patient. Submitting your site to the same search engine over and over will not speed up the process, and may actually hurt your chances of getting included. In most cases, it’s actually not necessary to submit your site manually to the search engines. If another site or two is linking to your site, the search engine spiders will most likely find you automatically. In fact, you may already be listed in most search engines. To find out if you’re already listed in a given search engine, just enter your domain name (website address) into the search box, for example www.mysite.com.

Unfortunately, just because you’re included in a given search engine’s search index doesn’t necessarily mean that your site will rank highly for certain keywords. To improve your search engine rankings, try to make your site as interesting as possible, provide lots of compelling content, and update your site with new information on a regular basis. This will cause more people to link to your site, which will in turn improve your rankings. Also, having a list of outbound links to relevant sites should help your rankings as well.

There are some techniques touted as improving your search engine rankings, which are considered shady (e.g. link farms, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, etc.). I would not advise you to use these techniques, as they may cause you to get banned from a search engine.

Conclusion

These are just a few suggestions for getting the word out about your website and the tips posted here are by no means meant to be exhaustive. The field of search engine optimization (SEO) is very complex and I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do to improve your search engine rankings. That said, these tips should get you started and will hopefully prompt you to come up with other ideas of your own.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 12:36 pm by Thomas Fowler.

Questions or comments about this article? Are there other topics you would like us to discuss in the future? Please contact us with your suggestions.

Author biography: Thomas Fowler is Vice President of Technology and Development at NoteWay Media. He has been involved with music for most of his life and now earns a living building websites.