You have a fantastic web design for your band or musician website - what next?
How to market your website.
Launching your new website is one thing. Attracting visitors is another. One big mistake that many new website owners make is to think that once a site has been launched, visitors will come flooding in via Google. This is not the case usually. It can take several months for Google index your site and even then, you may find that you are competing against rival sites for the same searches. Google gives priority to sites that have been established for a long time, sites with lots of content and sites with lots of inbound links from other websites.
It's important to remember that big companies pay a lot to teams of staff working round the clock to keep the company website top of the Google listings for certain key words. Obviously this isn't going to apply to small sites, but the principle is the same in that you have to work hard to market your site.
For a musician, band or music group, t's likely that you will want to rank well for searches for your name - the more unusual the better. You need to make sure your domain name contains your name and it's also a good idea to include a descriptive and geographic element to your name. For example, if your band is called 'Splitz' , rather than having www.splitz.co.uk as your domain name, you might consider the domain name www.splitzrockbandessexco.uk'. Having descriptive keywords in your domain name can improve your search engine results ranking and can result in focused traffic to your website.
All our sites are designed to be search engine friendly which means that they have hidden meta tags containing relevant keywords (sometimes used by the search engines to index your site), and the structure and coding of the site is designed to make it easy for the search engines to find their way around.
The key to getting a good ranking is to under take other marketing activities to get your band website known. At the very least you will need to:
1. Include your domain name as a signature on all your emails (to spread the word)
2. Include your domain name on all your promotional materials
3. Try to get other websites to include a link to your website (link building - involves emailing people requesting links)
The last point is important because inbound links to your website are one of the factors that Google uses to assign a ranking to a site. If your site has lots of inbound links from sites that Google considers an authority (established websites that Google already holds high regard for in your area), your website will receive 'reflected glory' and Google will look positively on your site. In practice, this involves a lot of surfing the net to find suitable sites and then emailing to request links. Sometimes sites will only agree to link to your site if you have a link to their site - known as a reciprocal link.
A final word of caution. Be very wary of 'web rings'. There are groups of website that link to each other with the sole purpose of building up the inbound link count to a website. Google is very suspicious of web rings as it sees them as a method of building up links artificially. If you link up to a web ring, your run the risk of being in a 'bad neighbourhood' and you may be penalised by Google; in other words, your site will appear way down the results list, if at all. The best advice is to avoid all web rings.
