Feed the google spider your Topspin buy page
Open a new tab or browser and go to google. Search the name of an album or if you get lucky and search an album from a band with good seo – try the example for this exercise enter this into google:
Neal Young Decade
For me the two first Google results are Wikipedia and the Amazon page selling this album.
I’m a fan of Neal Young but I also wanted to pick that album because Neal has been around a while and Decade is a pretty ordinary word. So to me, the reason these two sites have shown up at the top of Google instead of all those other many sites that have Neal Young and or the word Decade somewhere in the text is SEO pure and simple.
Search Engine Optimization is a good way to get some marketing done on the cheap. Here are some basic things that make SEO work:
Keywords in the URL – check out how both Wikipedia and Amazon have Neal Young and Decade in the URL and are right after the root domain name: amazon.com/start-some-keywords-to-improve-seo.com
So when you are thinking about putting your album out on your site using Topspin, you should put the name of your album into the URL, and if possible have it be not in a sub folder.
Google and other search engines think that the deeper something is in your site, the less important. So www.you.com/blog/category/2009/albums/favorite/albums/albumname is telling google “albumname” is less important then everything that came before it in the url.
www.you.com/albumname says that albumname is really important. That is most likely why Amazon has set their URL’s up this way – probably took them some serious tinkering to do it since they have a massive database that uses numbers and non-human readable stuff in the URL to let you search for anything and everything in their site. If Amazon thinks it’s worth putting design resources to turn computer URLs into human readable ones, you should think about just making your URLs human readable. Important to all you blog using people out there!
Search bots think the are human but they are not. They are trying to impersonate humans. That’s why having “human readable” URL’s matters. The fact that these are not humans also means that text you have in an image is NOT viewable and readable by a search engine bot.
I bet a lot of the most important links on your site use graphics so that they are pretty instead of lame looking text in one of the web’s defaults. SEO is a balancing act. You don’t necessarily want your site to be all text and data like wikipedia, but you may want to consider having your buttons be graphics with links as text sitting on top of your graphics.
Text matters then. Google thinks that people think that content that is BIG and is at the TOP of the page is more important that content that is small at the bottom of a page.
So if possible, have some text at the top of your page that communicates what is important to you! This text is also likely to get auto scraped by Google and shown in the text underneath the link in Google. As I search around on Google, there are clearly some tricks to forcing the text you want to be under the link but for the most part Google will take the top text on your page.
See the link to my site:
and of course text is spider food. Plain old text, text that is linked, image “alt” tags (tells the spider what that image is of) are all read by the search bot and the search bot then makes assumptions based on what the text is, where it is on your site, how big the font is, what URL it links to and so on.
Books have been written on SEO so that’s it for now – to sum up:
- Human readable URLS – just because your band name is top in a search doesn’t mean your new album page with direct to fan buy buttons from Topspin is top of the search
- Text as your navigation menu and other links whenever possible
- Use the alt tags! <src =”some url here” alt=”put your alt tag in” >
- Get some text up top on your page
- Check what text Google has under the link to your site
And stay on top of it. SEO is a constant process.
