Promotion and SEO for bands

To promote a band/artist website, or any other website for that matter, you need to get traffic - which you can get for free - if you get your site ranked high on Google and other search engines. To do this you need to optimise your site for search engines, known as SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is a complicated subject but one you must deal with if you are serious about promoting a website.

There are many things you can do with SEO, but probably the main thing that helps is having inbound links from other sites to yours, so search engines rank it higher. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. So Google uses this - amongst many other things - to determine how 'important' a page is; by the number and quality of links a page receives.

The beauty of the Musivine social network; your friends are also inbound links - from separate sites - that Google index. It's normal to exchange links with similar sites of similar content in order to share traffic. A Musivine friend is much the same thing. However for friends to work like this they must be exported using the 'Advanced Export' option. As well as exporting a group of friends togther, you can also export them one by one, so don't forget to share some link love.

There are hundreds of considerations involved with SEO, and Musivine is no silver bullet to solve all these problems, but it certainly goes a long way to help.

Another important factor is content, copy on your site that Google can index. So it is important to write stuff on your site (anything), not just using Musivine functionality, but directly on your own site. Try to make the content rich with lots of keywords that can be indexed and people may be searching for.

Always think in terms of using keywords wherever possible. But don't just spam with them, they must make sense to the reader and be in context.

• Put something descriptive and accurate in the <title> tag.
• Use the meta tags; title, description, keyword and author.
• Put something meaningful in the <h1> tag.
• Use hyphenated keywords in the URL.
• Don't use a frameset.
• Make your script valid XHTML.
• Use <alt> tags with images.

There's loads of information about SEO on the internet so there's not really much point in us compiling a list. Just Google for it...