Making your website rank well in search engines can seem like a daunting task. Now more than ever, people look to Google to find out information, and it’s important for your music website to work in search engines.

Not sure where to begin? Even starting with a few small things can help with the search engine optimization (also called SEO) for your website. Let’s look at a few quick ways to update the text on your website to help it rank better in search results!

Page Title:
Writing a descriptive page title tells Google what your website’s pages are about, and improves the chances of matching a search query.

Changing their page title from the default “Home” to something more like “Gladstone Ave – Acoustic-folk duo in Toronto” gives a bit more information about your band right off the bat. It makes the page more likely to return in search results that include “acoustic-folk” and “Toronto,” and a user is more likely to click on it because they know what they are clicking on (that IS the band website I was looking for!)

Add a custom meta description:
This tells the search engine what that specific page is about in more detail, and helps match the page to search results.
By default this is typically set to ‘Automatically generated from your page content’ which can work well. But it’s nice to have a bit more control, especially for your pages that don’t have much text, or if the text that you do have is not very descriptive or keyword friendly.

For your Home page, describe your band in detail. For your Music page, you’ll talk more about your sound or your latest CD. With your Events page’s description, you might mention that you play at a certain venue regularly, or an important upcoming show. Write these details in paragraph form, using around 155 characters.

Another reason to add a great page description? Social sharing sites like Facebook tend to use a page’s description when that page is shared.
 

Remember, Google is a machine, not a human, and can only match what people type into the search engine to your website if you provide the words. So adding a short paragraph to your Homepage that includes words that describe yourself and your music (called keywords) will help your website come up more easily in search.

To do this, write your bio and make sure to include your band name, your genre, your location – things that you think people would type into Google to find you – and put it right on your Homepage.

Search engines are also very smart, using complex algorithms to determine what is relevant on your pages, and can penalize you for stuffing many keywords that make no sense in context onto your page. So keep it simple, relevant, and human-readable.

Submit to Google!
Once you’ve done these updates, you should re-submit your website for Google to crawl.

Ready to get your music out there? MusicDigi makes it easy to upload your music on just about every digital store you can think of, including Apple Music, iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, and more. Sign up to MusicDigi to release your music today.