News: some tips for building your online presence.

News:
04-05-2009:

All about jazz pointed out this site... save me some time as it mentions all my main bug bears with Site designers who rip off guitar players. My opinion is you need a CMS, and style sheet templates. Wordpress, Blogger, google sites all have the right tools, combine this with a youtube for your videos and myspace (orkut as well of South Americas), plus twitter, feedburner for your RSS feed, google analytics for your web stats, flikr or picasa for images updates and your sorted. Tell that stupid "web designer" to go away and do some real work... (NB there are some good web designers too, it's just they don't appear to want to work for struggling guitar players).

1. Don't Build Your Site Using Only Flash - Unless properly planned in the design stages, Flash cannot be indexed by search engines.

2. Don't Build Your Site Only With Images - Again much harder for the search engines to find.

3. Use Key Words In Your Content - Make it easy for search engines to know this is a band site (your band's site) and not something else. In addition to words like guitar and drums consider a static page that is" focused solely on band facts - member info, publicity quotes, simple description of the band's sound, detailed discographies, and more"

4. Don't Just Rely Meta Tags - These hidden string of key words were all the rage, but search engines caught on and have devalued their use in rankings. (more on meta tags)

5. Develop A Link Strategy - The quality of both incoming and outgoing links matter to search engines. Find them, trade for them, put them on your site.

6. Don't Overlook Alternative Search Types - People don't just search for words. They search for images, documents and media like mp3's and videos too. Get them on your site and make sure that they are named properly.

7. Utilize Analytics - No where your traffic is coming and what they are clicking on using free tools like Google Analytics and Urchin