Search volume in my research is very important. While I focus on my optimization for search engines, am I really covering all the ground I could?

When I think of search queries I automatically think about Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. The one thing that strikes me is how people are using social media sites such as Youtube, Myspace, and Facebook for searches.

I came across a press release by comScore that displays some interesting search volume stats. To read more from the actual press release follow this link: comScore Releases August 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

The numbers don’t lie and those sites are all in the Top 20 for search volume. Youtube actually ranked 2nd after Google which definitely makes me want to add more videos about my band, and provide content and tags that optimize my chances of being seen. Create an entry point for your website.

Here is a summary of stats that were presented as an analysis of the U.S marketplace from July to August 2009.

1. Google sites own the search market with 13 billion search queries
2. Youtube is the 2nd most popular search engine after Google and Google sites with 3.5 billion searches
3. Yahoo sites are next with 2.8 billion queries
4. Microsoft makes up for 1.3 billion searches, 6% gain from July
5. Craigslist followed with 682 million searches
6. Facebook saw the biggest percentage in change with a 20% increase in search volume leading to 324 million searches
7. Withing the top 20 sites in the US, there is Youtube, Myspace, Facebook
8. Social Media sites become search engine portals for users

With Facebook also seeing that 20% jump, which was the largest jump in search queries percent change for that month, I think its time to put aside some of my distaste for Facebook as a music marketing tool. A band page is a must. If someone is mainly using just Facebook for searches, will they be able to find you?

Maybe you may use some of these sites as landing pages or just display your RSS feed to create entry points. The key is maximizing your visibility where people are searching.

Part of our mission as Do It Yourself marketing musicians involves making educated guesses for planning our next moves. Find stats, analyze them and make moves according to what you conclude.

This is where the importance of keyword research lies. We know where a majority of our search volume for the U.S is located and who is hot or what social network we need to keep on our radar.

I want to place my content in front of a growing audience instead of a dying one. I want to make sure I can do my best to optimize my visibility online. I want to optimize my distribution channels and bridge that gap between my website and social network profiles.

These stats are very promising because they show the importance of social media sites, being used for more than their initial mission. Optimizing for search engines is only part of the attack.

Search engine optimization is a very critical part of your music marketing campaign. What active efforts are you taking to strengthen your keywords? I asked myself this same question and tried different ways to keep a continuous effort towards improvement. Keyword research involves planning for future stability in blog traffic.

With Bing gaining ground on Google’s search domination, I began to think about how my website structure is being interpreted by the search engine spiders. I do have a good amount of articles but are they optimized to my benefit?

Automatic SEO links is a great Wordpress plugin that allows you to take control of your keyword promotion.

Automatic SEO Links

Automatic SEO links is a Wordpress plugin that is a great time saver and efficient promoter. When blogging, you don’t have to manually enter your links, you just choose a keyword and a URL and this plugin will find the keyword mentioned on your blog and add a link of your choice.

For example, I want to promote a “free music” page on my website. I go to the Wordpress settings for Automatic SEO Links and add the keyword “free music” with a link to my free music post. Anytime I mention “free music” in future posts, it will go to the desired link I set. No more needing to remember URL’s and inserting links manually.

Hip Hop Distribution Homework

You don’t need this plugin specifically to practice keyword strengthening. The important thing to ask is how can I improve my blog’s keyword visibility, internal link structure and readability?

Here are some examples of how I will use this plugin:

• Find 5 Keywords to Promote: Choose five articles you currently have that are getting visitors. Assign each article a strong keyword and use some of those keywords in future articles. Promoting old articles and increasing reader relevance. Use your new keywords stats to give your readers what they want and add hot new keywords to build on traffic.
• Push a Call to Action: Your posts are your greatest asset. If you have a album landing page or music store, create some keywords that can direct your fans to those places. For example: “download our music”, “buy our album” or “free instrumentals” could link to your storefront or whatever desired posts. Great way to keep readers on your site and build out your pages as information resources. Don’t forget the important one: subscribe here
• Affiliate Promotion: promoting affiliate links is easy now. Add your selected keywords and have them automatically link to your referral service. Nice way to make a little extra change without having to enter all the affiliate tags and id’s.

The main reason that I was impressed with this plugin is because it created a process of improvement in multiple areas.

While thinking about keywords, I began thinking about which articles to promote, or which ones needed the most help. The thought process also led me to think about how good was my call to action and my blog organization. Creating a better reader experience by increasing the relevance of your keywords to your title will lead to traffic improvements and better rankings.

Please feel free to leave some of your suggestions for keyword research and improvement: Musicians are always listening.

Music marketing provides every musician with an interesting journey of finding the right ingredients for increased visibility. Part of my absence on this blog was due to increasing our band efforts on our Fried Roots blog. The key stat for us was seeing increased international visitors, and we wanted to capitalize on our new found success. Each month this number is rising but how can we reach out to them better?

Taking an active approach finding them and reaching their discussions could prove very beneficial. I began using Google Global, a Firefox extension, that allows you to see search results in Google from different places around the globe, such as, the UK, Australia and Ireland for instance. I am in the early phases of using this extension but can see some great uses for it: Find relevant users from different regions, increase your free traffic and improve your global presence.

Google Global allows for you to view paid and organic search results:

1. as they appear in different cities
2. as they appear in different regions
3. from a specific IP address
4. results from any US zip code
5. and opens in multiple tabs for comparison

As a musician, we are in a great position for marketing: music is universal. Experimenting in different markets will allow for us to find international success, by infiltrating markets that aren’t so saturated. For example, Hip Hop in the USA is very saturated. There is a new rap group coming to light every second.

By actively searching for new markets, you are taking action and testing different niches. Some actions might be hit and miss, however, how good can your music survive in the midst of infinite competition? I want to develop more of a SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis that will improve our online presence. Who knew in college that endless research papers and case studies could improve my music marketing research.

Think about different ways of using these varying search results to your advantage. First thing you get to see is what kind of competition is ranking #1 in various regions. This might be a great thing to use for commenting: finding high ranking relevant pages in different regions related to your music operation. For example, doing a search for “hip hop music” since it’s related to my music campaign and finding pages in Australia that I can join the discussion on and even network with international bloggers.

The key for me is taking the active approach to increasing international visibility. This same energy can be transferred to Twitter and contacting international bloggers and musicians, asking more questions and finding what works in different countries.

My brother stressed a very valid point to me while listening to a favorite underground artist of his: “There are people out there that appreciate music like this”. It’s my job to find them and introduce them to Fried Roots.

I will update you later with any positive results we encounter and better uses of this tool I can find online. Have fun with this tool and at the very least use this extension to research your genre across the globe.

While spending time writing for my band blog, I’ve been constantly monitoring whats been working with increasing our unique visitors. The weekly blog writing and social bookmarking has worked wonders seeing a continuous increase in monthly visitors and social networking is adding a great marketing attack. One key stat was seeing the number of external links bringing in visitors to the website, due to commenting. The mission is simple: share my opinion and give my blog an identity.

The more time I dedicated to commenting around the web, the better the results. The key here was breathing life into every article by promoting each individual article, not just the home address of my blog. Professional bloggers around the web have mentioned this technique as a way of keeping older articles in the mix and keeping them from reaching the search engine graveyard.

Since I dedicate time to writing articles and socially sharing them and bookmarking them, I owe it to my hard work to promote each article, it is a representation of your blog. Here are some important things to note about commenting:

• Keeps music posts alive
• You are actively pursuing Targeted Visitors and directing them to specific content
• Open the door to networking: (bloggers love comments)
• Creating more entry points to your blog

I am constantly adding sites to my Google Reader that would aid my efforts. Be picky and find sites you enjoy visiting. If you haven’t done so yet, get a Gravatar to make your comments stand out: This will associate an image with your comments, which is great for your branding.

Disqus is also a great service and tool for web comments. I use Disqus on this blog and it is great for making comments easier and more interactive, and its free. Its great for tracking and managing your comments and replies.

One useful feature from Disqus is you can import the RSS feed of your latest comments into other sites such as Friendfeed and have your comments spark more discussion. For example, the other day I received a comment on a post that was about 3 months old and I replied to it. This conversation was imported into my Friendfeed room showing both the comment and reply and the link to the old article. This way my Friendfeed subscribers can join the discussion and visit an article that was 3 months old.

Take an older article and promote it. Find other sites with relevant topics and leave your opinion. The days you are not writing like a newsreporter can become great days to leave comments and introduce the web to your blog. Make your articles work for you!

Every band needs to pay attention to their online reputation. I created a post about a month ago that was called “Set Up Alerts for Music Promotion Campaign” that talked about using services like Google Alerts or Monitter for Twitter where you can see what is being talked about online, in particular your band and music. These tools allow you to find out what is being said and if positive, you can join in conversations around the web. If negative, you could start your clean up campaign and work on creating better press.

I received a comment from recent visitor Sexymathematics and he had a great recommendation to check out Steprep as another alternative to Google Alerts with better features. This is the demo video for the free service:

The key slogan here is “Monitor, Manage and Build”. This process gives musicians an active role in their positive promotion. This service allows you to rate the comments found around the web and taking the positive comments and placing them in a widget. This is a very nice feature for artists.

You can use this widget to let fans be introduced to other places people can talk about your music while promoting real opinions. The claim of this service is that if you place this widget with positive comments on your social profiles around the web, the links pointing back to the stories of your choice will show up higher in the search results. The end result, positive comments get more visibility.

I will definitely give Steprep a shot and add it to the arsenal of brand monitoring for musicians.