Have I done enough to get Noticed by Google?

Thanks for taking the time to read my question.

I have spent the past few weeks reading pages all over the web, trying to learn and figure out what I need to do to my pages, so that they come up with people type in words in the search engines.

I am just wondering if someone knows how to change my pages to get these results.

The web site is for my band. The band name is Pierced. I would think that key words like Pierced, Band, Rock, Music, Lyrics, Songs etc would find my site. NOPE.

I know that having Flash as my initial page is not as great, but I've tried to put some content on the page with the font color the same as the background (to hide it).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

www.pierced.ca is the site.

Thanks again,

Brad

Don't do this. Don't put some content on the page and use the font color to hide it. Search engines are getting smarter. In fact, as a guideline, this is one of the first things Google tells webmasters not to do. Have a look: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Your site could get penalized if you use this technique.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is referred to as spamming the search engine.

that's correct JFetting, it's like cheating

well mbrad the keywords you are looking for are to known, try searching for them and you'll see that tons of big sites are there. Maybe you should look for keywords that are less known or used, that's difficult but it's easier to be in top ten of the word ROCK for sure.

the first thing you need is to come up with a set of keywords which are popular (searched by many users) and not too competitive (easy to SEO to have a good SERP).

Thanks for the link, and for letting me know that having the text the same color as the page is considered spamming.

I'll get rid of that right away.

Any other comments?

Thanks,

Brad

mbrad. I have some advice, although it might not be your initial intentions.

If you had a commercial site, or even a personal site of a specific type of content, I would have told you to find all your competitors keywords, then go to googles keywrod suggestion tool - put each of your original keywords in, and copy the entire list of suggestions they give for each. Then you will have a list of thousands of words. Cut that down to the ones important to you. Take that list and optimize for the primary ones, and experiment with the secondary ones.

However, your site is for your band - a very specific thing. Trying to optimise your site for words like "rock" or "punk rock" etc.. is absolutely 100% futile. There are probably over 50 million sites trying to optimize for such words.

The only thing I think that will help you is to optimize for a few words; your bands name, and local names such as cities, and venue names. The only people you could attract from google are ones looking for these things. No one looking on google for "rock bands" would ever find your site.

But your goal is to get interested people there right? So here's my advice

Sign up on related forums - famous band forums, and musician forums. Don't spam your site, but put it in your footer. Post on and off on each forum for one week. Only then should you innocently mention your bands site in related posts.

go to www.big-boards.com

this is a site which indexes the forums with the most members, many with over half a million. Go to these forums, and do the same - even if they're unrelated.

Being that I am a musician, and entering the business, I would of course advise you to advertise your URL at every show, and on every single item you give out or sell. Slap it on the cover of your album! and if your banned name is Pierced, put the URL on your show banners, and venue materials!

In otherwords, I think that your goal of getting more people hearing the music online won't be well reached by doing what a commercial site (such as my own) has to deal with...SEO. I think it will benefit you much more to enter online communities, and without spamming, mention your music to others there and get them talking.

One more thing - I'm not sure if mp3.com is still up, but there are many sites that offer independant bands to post their music by genre, and this can bring in a lot of people too!

So there's my advice, some of which you probably alread knew but I think those are the primary ways for a "local band" to get people to their music.

Lastly, I don't know your site URL but having your site very simple, easy to navigate, and offering media will help. I actuallly used to make sites for independant bands, so if you want advice PM me your url and I could take a look.

Good luck!

A few more things to add.

Even though in using your sensitive keywords, you won't have much competition - here are some easy tips to getting your keywords more powerful. SEO in 60 seconds

1. put all your keywords in your meta tag. some engines don't even care about this - but might as well do it

2. make sure you have nice text on your main page, and your secondary pages, using these same words in the text. But make them make sense!

3. here's a secret - for every image you have on your site, enter the ALT value into the image line. For instance normally it looks like this

<img name="some name" src="url for image">

but you wanna add this - <img name="some name" src="url for image" alt="keywords here">

search engines often like to looka t your alt tag for content. For each image on your site put about 5 of your total keywords (probably no more than 50 in total) in the alt tag. this can help

4. make sure that a few of your pages get indexed by google. this will happen naturally as long as you do all of the above for all the pages.

5. make sure you use the follow and index commands in your head script.

6. for the spiders to get to your secondary pages, make sure you have links on your main page to these others pages - don't put them in flash at all, plain html

that will help you a lot.

By the way - I took a look at your site and I must mention that your site design looks wonderful. However, your flash intro looks much much worse than your site - I did not expect your inner site to look that good after the flash. And as mentioned earlier, the flash will not only hurt SEO but it will load slower which means some people may say "ah, screw it" before getting to your content.

I would highly recommend you remove the flash, get them to your content as soon as possible. the inner site looks wonderful.

Thank you so much for all your tips. I will do my best to implement them. I think I have some of them covered, but the rest will be implemented soon.

I took down the Flash part.

One question what do you mean by point #5?

"5. make sure you use the follow and index commands in your head script."

I'll be sure to visit those forums. I'm sure I'll be able to learn something there too.

Thanks again.

p.s. did you listen to the music?

Brad

hey, let me explain.

You probably know what robots/spiders are - they're the programs that "crawl" the internet, and index it for search engines.

there are two ways to control them with access to your site. The first is a robots.txt file - if you do not know what this is I can explain further, let me know.

but the one i was talking about is the robots META tag. You surely know what a meta tag is. Well there is one that tells a robot what to do when it gets to your site.

THere are two values you can do. the first one tells the robot whether or not to FOLLOW all the links on your mainpage, and then keep following them forever etc..

the second one tells the robot if it is allows to INDEX the material it finds.

In your case, you (and almost anyone) wants the robot to do both, so what you wanna do is add the following phrase into your <head></head> where your other meta tags are

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">

that's it!
the reverse options would be "NO INDEX" and "NO FOLLOW" but noone, except people who never want their site indexed by search engines would do this.

...and in hindsight, i believe that this is actually what the robot does if there is no meta robot tag.........but hey I'd do it anyways!

Ok, I get it.

I actually already did this, I just didn't understand what you meant.

Here is what I have...

<meta name="Revisit-After" content="7 Days">
<meta name="Robots" content="index, follow">

Thanks so much for all of your help.

I have found out about robots.txt as well, and I have one of those too. I found a page on the internet that generates them for you. It limits the robot to specific folders. I have limited it to the folder with the web pages.

Have a great day.

Brad

I cannot see a difference between this and using font color to hide text. The alt attribute is there for those who don't have the ability, for one reason or another, to see graphics. You are supposed to discribe the image, not put general keywords there.

Use the alt attribute - W3C

the difference is that many search engines look to the alt tag content for help in IDing what the site is about.

whereas, hiding text in a font color is a bannable offense.

Now do you see the different. who cares what something in a coding language was meant for - the vast majority of inventive coding is done from using things in different ways than they were meant. that's called innovation.