Link Building Guide - Simple SEO for musicians

This might seem a slightly odd post for our readers since it's about how you can approach 'linkbuilding' so that your website ranks well in Google searches. Trust us - it's relevant!

We looked at how you should apply SEO (search engine optimisation) to your band website in this post - Band Website SEO.

The basic concepts of SEO are that you set up your site correctly with what is called 'on-page SEO' and then you increase the position of your site in the search engine results by Google (and Bing, Yahoo etc) seeing that other sites have linked to your site and the content on there - i.e. Google rates sites that have good links from other sites.

So, more than half the battle with SEO is to get links to your site. Many come organically from people liking your site (and these are essentially the best links as you don't have to do anything to get them!) but others can be built by you getting other sites to link to you.

Why would you do this as a musican?

Well, you might decide that you need to make sure that your site ranks well for your band name (duh!) and if that name is a widely used term, you might not appear on page one unless you build some links. Same goes for song and album titles.

In addition, it's a good strategy to try to rank for 'your genre / your town' by which I mean if you're a folk band from London, it is perfectly possible to rank on page 1 of Google for the terms 'Folk music London', 'Folk London' or 'Folk band London'.

That's the simple version - as ever, I promise to look at this more on the main site over time. In addition searching for advice on 'backlinking' or 'linkbuilding' will give you masses of material to learn from.

But for now a good friend of mine, Dave Cain, has just written a very comprehensive post called '26 methods to boost your rankings' in which he explains how to build links and which are the best. It's pretty busines oriented but there's a lot musicians can learn from it.

Chek it out here.