Here are the 10 best SEO tips to help with your search engine rankings. Ranking in Google’s search engine can lead to tons of traffic to your music website.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This means having a website and content that is easily read and found by search engines. View on YouTube
Why Should You Care About SEO?
Because if your website is SEO friendly and has quality content, it can rank well in search engines. Which can lead to free “quality” website traffic, which can lead to more online sales.
For example, if you are a music producer selling beats online, you want to have an SEO-friendly website so you can appear in search engines when someone searches for “Hip Hop Beats For Sale” or “Trap Beats”.
When someone is searching for these terms and finds your website, they will be more willing to buy from you, rather than you sharing your beat selling website with strangers that aren’t searching for beats.
You also want to appear in search engines when your music producer name or brand name is searched for.
So here are 10 helpful Music SEO tips you should implement today.
Related: Music Maker WordPress Theme
Music SEO Tips
1. Create a WordPress Website
WordPress is a powerful content management system that allows you to create pages and blog posts easily. From the SEO perspective, it is highly recommended because of its SEO friendly templates and free plugins that will improve your search engine rankings.
The more online content you create, the more opportunities you have for your content to be found in search engines.
WordPress allows you to create unlimited blog posts and unlimited static pages which can all be found in search engines.
Related: How to Create a WordPress Website
2. Use Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a FREE WordPress plugin that grades your website content to help you improve it so you can rank better in search engines.
The plugin gives you grades for both your blog articles and static pages to show you what can be improved from an SEO perspective.
There are a lot of free tutorials and SEO tips on the Yoast SEO Website that will help you learn more about SEO and using their plugin.
3. Learn Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization is one of the key elements of a good SEO strategy.
It consists of researching and analyzing keywords and creating content on your website accordingly, so each time someone puts that keyword in a search engine, they will ideally find your website, thus generating qualified traffic.
There are a lot of useful free keyword research tools on the internet that you can use to improve your strategies, such as Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends.
Video: SEO For Beginners
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4. Create a Sitemap & Submit it to Google
A sitemap is a file that contains the list of pages on your website. It is important to submit this information to Google so the search engine can crawl your website to index pages.
If you install Yoast SEO, there is a option to create a site map.
Here is a tutorial on how to submit your sitemap to Google.
5. Create Helpful Articles
Google’s algorithm is smart enough to judge which article is helpful and which articles are not. This plays a big role in deciding whether or not a website will be shown in the top search results.
So you should always be making helpful, concise, and precise articles. That is articles that have no grammatical errors, features well-placed keywords, and have a good length
Google tends to favor long articles. The longer the better. But that is in theory because article lengths can vary greatly. Your blog articles should be longer than 500 words to rank well, but not so long that people don’t want to read them.
Related: Reasons Music Producers & Musicians Should Start Blogging
6. Create Domain Authority by Guest Posting
Domain authority is a ranking that describes a website’s relevance and quality based on various factors. The factors go from having helpful articles, to how many times your website is quoted by others, the latter being very effective to boost your domain’s rank.
That’s why it is important to receive backlinks from other websites with guest posts. Make sure you create a relationship with other producers and people from music production blogs and don’t be afraid to ask to appear on their blog.
7. Join Google Webmasters
Google Webmasters is a helpful tool that will scan your website for any potential SEO errors and tell you how to fix the issues. The tool helps you avoid issues that may prevent your website from appearing in search engines.
8. Make Your Website URLs Search Engine Friendly
You should set your website to have clean, user-friendly URLs. This is an important step not to be skipped.
So instead of your domain looking like this: https://your-domain.com/?p=2345
It should have a title that informs it’s subject, so the search engines can read your content better.
Example: https://your-domain.com/professional-hip-hop-beats-for-sale
Related: How to Pick a Great Domain Name
9. Create an Optimized Structure
At first page structure may look a bit complicated but it’s fairly simple. To have an optimized structure, you must have your Header 1, which is the main title of the article or page, and Header 2, 3, and so on, that are used as subtitles. This way of dividing your pages and articles is the most optimal for search engines to crawl through.
You should also compress your images so that your website’s loading time is improved, which is important for SEO ranking. There are a lot of free plugins for WordPress that can help you compress images like reSmush.it.
10. Be Patient
It can take months for your website improvements to appear in search engines. Sure it’s a long way to get into Google’s top results, but continuing to improve your website content and speed, it will eventually boost ranking.
Helpful Music SEO Tools
Here are some of our favorite online SEO tools.
- SEO Webpage Analyzer – One of the tools we have built enables us to take a snapshot of a page to see how it can be improved.
- SEOrch – Finds common SEO mistakes and makes suggestions on how to improve your website.
- Google PageSpeed Insights – Check your website loading speed.
- Ubersuggest – Helps you generate keyword ideas for your content marketing strategy.
- Compress Images – Compress website images.
S.E.O Infographic
S.T.A.C Your Site
Structure
Sitemap – Help search engines find all the pages on your site.
- Create XML and HTML versions
- Use third party tools
- Upload to Webmaster Tools – Google Webmaster Tools
Canonical Pages – A single URL for your main page.
- Avoid multiple URLs
- Use 301 redirects for alternative versions
Topicality
Descriptions – Make your URLs search engine friendly.
- Use dashes ( – ), not underscores ( _ ) to separate content
- Use real words that any human can read.
- Platforms like Drupal and WordPress create descriptive URLs for pages / post automatically.
Tags – Match your tags to keyword search terms.
- Keywords is not in reference to the meta keywords.
- Most search engines don’t recognize the meta keywords HTML tag.
- Use the meta descriptions tags, in addition to making sure your page content utilizes relevant keywords.
- Additional tags to note for SEO: Robots, alt tag, title tag, body header tag.
Keyword Searches – Ensure site content matches keyword search terms through use of keyword tools.
- Proximity of terms is important, so keep your keywords adjacent.
Adele example using Google’s keyword tool:
- lyrics adele = 1.5M searches
- download adele = 823K searches
- adele mp3 = 550k searches
Direct users away from torrent sites. Use “torrent” as a keyword. i.e., “Legit album not available through torrent sites. Please support the artist!”
Authority
Reputation – How many popular and relevant sites link to your page?
- Link to the stores and apps that sell your music.
- Leverage social media for creating backlinks to increase search engine visibility.
- Write guest posts on reputable sites to generate positive backlinks.
Links – Consider keyword utilization when building links.
- For URL shorteners (e.g. Bit.ly ) make sure 301 redirect is utilized.
- Build backlinks ( off page ) or outsource to a reputable provider.
Content
High ROI Content on Top Pages – Websites are organized in the hierarchy. Place the most relevant content in the highest tier to capture search traffic, such as:
- Showcase content
- Digital store or link to buy your recent album, song or merch
- Tour dates
- News
Unique & Authentic
- Avoid copying content from other websites. Unique / rich content = increased rank / credibility.
Common Speech
- Use language familiar with your target audience.
- Keywords should reflect common language and phrasing.
Conclusion
Use free WordPress plugins to help you improve your website’s SEO chances.
Learn about keyword optimization and how to use it properly.
Remember to submit your website’s sitemap to Google.
Create helpful articles and domain authority by guest posting on other people’s blogs.
Join Google Webmasters to learn more about how can you improve your website’s position on search results.
Always make user-friendly URLs and remember to structure your site well.
Last but not least, be patient, results can take a long time to appear.
