I first commissioned a website about 10 years ago and spent around £5,000 having it designed and built. No one mentioned to me about how we would get traffic to it.

Clearly there is no point in having a website if no one can find you while searching the internet. Your website needs to rank high in the search engines for your chosen keywords. So for example if one of your main keywords is “recording studios central London” you should be appearing on page 1 of Google’s results for this search term. Ideally in one of the top three positions. Studies show that most people do not go beyond page one of Google when searching online.

A lot of SEO experts try and make SEO sound complicated. I do not believe it has to be. It is a vital part of digital music marketing.

There are a couple of simple things you can do to have your website ranking well for your chosen keywords in the online music marketing niche.

Well researched keywords – Google’s free keyword tool is excellent at researching keywords.
Using the keywords correctly in your Meta-tags
Using your keywords on page
Back links to your website from relevant websites

Google is obsessed with relevancy and one of the main ways Google decides how relevant a website is by the quality of the links linking back to your site.

So again using the example of the recording studio. We would seek to get links back from music related websites like record companies online music promotion companies and other recording studios, Etcetera. In addition to this we would try and get links from related music websites with high Google page rank. Preferably PR3 or above.

The more back links you can get from “authority sites” the better. Good quality back links are an essential component of any search engine optimisation campaign for all but the less competitive search terms. If we do a search on Google for “Central London recording studio” you will see more than 185,000 results. How does Google decide which search term comes first and on page one of Google? And how can you persuade Google to feature your website in the top 5 search results?

The keywords used on your page and in the meta tags are not enough as Google does not trust them as its easy for you to manipulate them.