October 13, 2010 Hot Links! How Hyperlinks Can Make Your Music Easier to Find Online
Did you know that the hyperlinks you create can boost your search engine ranking and improve your web presence? It’s true! Using relevant link text when you link back to your website, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. will boost and broaden the search ranking of the page you are linking to. These keyword-studded “backlinks” will make it easier for your fans to find your web pages in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing because these pages will rank better in search results. And it only takes a few seconds to turn a boring “click here” link into a search engine optimized one. Now most musicians are at least somewhat experienced in authoring text links (also known as anchor links, hot links or hyperlinks). Often these links read something like:
Click Here!
Follow me on Twitter
CLICK TO BUY MY ALBUM
And even more commonly, we’re all guilty of posting long unruly URLs. Links that look something like this:
http://mywebsite.com/bigfolder/music/littlefolder/4345/cool_stuff.html/?utm_source=babybaby&utm_campaign=rockharder&utm_medium=PPC&utm_term=ouch&utm_content=hamsandwhich
While these kinds of links get the job done, with a little forethought and descriptive link text, you can increase your visibility in search engines every time you create a new link. Doing this will help you gain more fans, sell more music, and advance your efforts towards total world domination. The trick is to make links that use relevant keywords. Use words that describe your music. Forget “Click Here!” (That’s so 1990’s). Try “Visit my swank dub-fusion website for lovers” instead. Just be sure your word choice really describes your music.
How it Works
Let’s say you put the following link on your blog: “Discover Party Pants’ dramatic power-ballad on MySpace.” And lets assume this link goes directly to the Party Pants MySpace page. In effect, you’re telling Google and other search engines that the terms “power-ballad,” “dramatic,” and “Party Pants” are all relevant search terms for the Party Pants MySpace page. You’re also telling Google that somebody cares enough about this page to link to it. Believe it or not, there are a lot of lonely web pages out there that have never been linked to. Now if you were to sprinkle thousands of links like this all over the web on popular sites, it would technically be possible for someone to type “power-ballad” into Google and get the Party Pants’ MySpace page as the number one result. Woo-who! You’ve suddenly become the most popular power-balladeers on Google.
What Have We Learned?
Links that use targeted keywords can make your Facebook page, artist website, or album page on CD Baby, more visible in search results. Of course, a backlink on the New York Times front page will give you a considerably bigger boost then a link on a relatively unknown blog. But every bit helps! If you haven’t much practice creating html hyperlinks, learning the basics really shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes of reading and a little practice. We recommend the W3 Schools html link tutorial here. Also, many blogs and website editors make linking easy with handy link creator functions.
Blogs, web pages, and forums are common places to create text links like this. Make sure that your friends and fans link to you from their sites as well. In some cases, they may allow you to create the link for them. But don’t expect your average blogger to always create the perfect keyword optimised link. Sometimes you have to live with, “click here.”
(Note: Facebook and Twitter do not allow you to post html text links, but there are many places that you can)
Further Reading:
Anchor Text Optimization on Web Pro News
The Importance of Anchor Text in SEO
That’s it. Now go out there and make some Hot Links!
Published Via Host Baby: Websites for Bands and Musicians
Chris Bolton, hot links, hyperlink, keywords, search engine
Reader Comments (4)
Thank you very much for this article, too many do the "click here" mistake.
But there are a few issues with the "best places" mentioned above:
- E-Mails are not read by search engines (thank god). An exception is google-mail, but the information is only used for ad targeting. No point in using SEO techniques in e-mails or e-mail only newsletters.
- Myspace obfuscate the links, Facebook completely blocks Google's spider. Don't waste your time optimizing your link text (both do this to avoid link farming accounts).
- Forums have a very low priority, they also have been massively used for link farming in the past.
There are also other aspects one should consider. A link has a visible text and a title attribute. The latter is very important to better specify what the link is really about. For example, the visible text might be "buy album Z" and the title attribute (appearing as tool-tip) might be "Order the latest album Y from the X label website".
In any way, the effect of linking yourself manually is totally ineffective. Google quickly identifies your "network" and lowers the priority of your own referencing to virtually "zero".
The most effective way can be grouped under the topic "shine on others, so that they shine back on you". This is probably the most effective philosophy on the web today - "brute-force" self marketing fails terribly on the Web 2.0 - it's outdated and seriously decreases your credibility. The latter is probably the main reason why the lazy and selfish business model of all major labels stopped working over night.
Link and write about the people you like, they'll notice it and most probably link back to you sooner or later. Same with your fans, make it easy for your fans to link back to you. Either with cool link "buttons", pre-generated short urls on your website's pages or embeddable widgets. Make it easy for your fans to talk about you on the web - this involves free music, videos, cool pictures and stories. This will really improve your search engine results.
Refer to bloggers, these guys love checking their statistics and will immediately see you kind links referencing to their blog. You can be sure that these bloggers will check out your music.
There's also an evil trick which is rarely used to get the attention of bloggers without actually linking to them. Every browser sends a so called "referrer" to the target page, which is in fact the website where the link was located. There are some browser plug-ins available that can manipulate this referrer information. Just enter your website's address and surf the blogs you like most. You website's URL will now appear in the blog statistics as a referer - the blogger will most probably click it to check out who linked to them. ;)
Great SEO advice. I'd forgotten about the funky redirection stuff that MySpace does. I guess your right about email. I shoulda known that clicking on the link will only transmit the url and not the metadata.
Chris
click here has it's uses.
It's a call to action, which musicians should think more about. It's not all about SEO.
Good advice, Fabien!
Great post, great comments, here is my 2p. . .
Use firefox plugins which show 'nofollow' or 'follow' websites. Will save a hell of a lot of time and when you look for these keywords in the pages source CTRL + U. Will instantly tell you if its worth spending time on that site or not.
Still if a website is very important to you, still get involved with the chat and leave a comment. As Music Think Tank is a nofollow website, but you get loads of links in comments and articles.
This link will cover introdcution to SEO for bands in another direction, there are 3 pages covering other ideas too.
As well as the plugin to show you nofollow websites, (or using view source). Remember, your trying to please more than one search engine here. By this i mean, using the ideas mentioned above is great, so even foot fall to your website through links is a bonus. Then if other search engines do things differently to Google you still may be in with a shot of that extra authority you were on about.
One last thing, its a long game SEO, professionals will take 6 months if they need to, thats a fair few hours a week you could be recording or doing video marketing. I mention video marketing because sites such as Youtube never get their tags utilized properly and bands loose potential there, think about that! Its still Search Engine Optimization, with an extra S, for Service, SSEO ;]
Good luck all, and keep this up MTT and all whom dwell here!