Today let's venture slightly off the beaten path of your musical development and independent artist career responsibilities... Let's talk about your online presence. Today we are going to talk about an often overlooked area of building your online presence... It's called Link Building. Link-what...? Exactly.

link building
For Musicians Websites?

link building
for artists/musicians websites is not something that is typically addressed by the independent artist because they just don't usually understand what it means, and why it's important.

Independent artists, Musicians, and Bands that are active in building their online presence are typically engaged with blogging, list-building, and social media... Which is good! If you are actively communicating with your audience through regular blogging, sharing content through social media, and email; you are way ahead of the curve, and i salute you!

The good news is that if you are doing these things, you already ARE creating and building new links, you just may not know it.

But after this article, you will know what most don't, understand that links are important, why exactly they are valuable, and how you can get more.

What is Link Building? What are you talking about...

Link Building (sometimes referred to as Backlinks) is very simple, it is the foundation for the internets connectivity. It's how people find your pages online.

When you click on that little (typically blue) link on someone's web-page, or from the search engines results page, or from twitter/facebook/anywhere... You are being instantly connected to another page somewhere on the internet.

Links are great. We want as many good ones as we can get. Here's why:

1. More links = More potential visitors/fans/subscribers/sales (all of which are good)

2. Links pointing to your pages are essentially considered a "vote" in the eyes of the Search engines -which rank other websites and send them relevant new visitors.

Search engine traffic may not be something you have planned on as a strategy for marketing your online presence. But let me ask you... why not?

All you have to do is figure out the keywords for something that SOMEONE IN THE WORLD would use to find information they were interested in, that you could also write about, and then target those keywords.

With a little Link building and promotion you could have targeted traffic from that search term for the rest of your life, with very little further work. (Not necessarily very competitive keywords mind you, those require work to stay at the top, but "Long-tail" keywords, which are longer keyword phrases with less competition)

Over time, repeating this (albeit over-simplified) process for building your pages could mean substantial new visitors and an effortless stream of new fans and audience growth.

--For example, let's say 10-1000 people using a long-tail search phrase like SEO for Artists and Musicians.

It's ALL Pages and Links.

So, remember, the WHOLE INTERNET is simply PAGES, and LINKS.

People find pages through links, and those links = search engine love, and more visitors/fans/subscribers/sales.

The most amount of quality links pointing back to our websites and web 2 properties we can get is what we are trying to accomplish with Link Building. You now know why Link Building is so valuable.

So Who Should Be Building Links Actively?

Anyone with a website that wants to grow their audience and acquire more visitors for the long-term.

It's really that simple. If you have great music, (first priority) you have a blog and you use it-as well as are building your email list and social media following, then building links is just a no-brainer to build your brands reach and audience.

But before you throw your hands up in the air with an ARE YOU SERIOUS!? How much more can i do, im already spread so thin!..... I get it. We all are.

The good news is that we're not talking about large-scale Link Building campaigns where corporate level SEO teams are brought in to handle the Job. Im talking about some very basic stuff that can really help you maximize the stuff you are doing already, and hopefully pull in some more traffic from some of the most effective streams.

Simple Link Building Strategies for Independent Artists/Bands/Musicians

Blog Posting

Writing great, unique content and sharing it on your blog is the first and most important link building strategy, as it is the core. We are trying to build links to pages on our site, because that's where we want the traffic to end up at. And If the content ain't good, no ones gonna stay. Pretty cut and dry.

Blog Commenting on hub sites and good blogs

Although not really a link-building strategy as much as a networking and relationship building strategy, commenting on industry blogs and being engaged in conversations is a great way to tell people in your industry that you are around, and you can even pull in some traffic back to your site on occasion as well.

Social Link-spread

Every-time you create new content you should be sharing them across your expansive network of social properties by posting links and sharing with your fans and followers.

Relevant Directories

This is a great way to build good one-way links that will be helpful in the long-term, the great thing is there are quite a few good ones for independent artists and musicians, just as there are many good resources. Just search for relevant directories like "Independent Singer Songwriter directory", or musician directories, or music resources directory, you get the idea... If you are a Classical Composer they probably have a specific directory you can get into. And if you are a Hip Hop Artist, it does you little good to try to get into it.

I'll be writing up a guide of the best Link Building Directories for artists/musicians pretty soon.

Setup an RSS Feed

By setting up an RSS feed, you are syndicating your blog with an aggregator service that will make it easy to subscribe to updates from your website without having to actually go and check to see if you've put anything new out. This is really convenient for most people. You can build a link and perhaps even get some traffic - automatically. Go register for a Google Feedburner account for free.

Profile Links

One of the easiest and best things you can do is to link all of your web 2 pages and accounts together.

Profile links are a fantastic to utilize what you have working for you already. Go ahead and fill out all your profiles completely, and add links to your other pages. The name of the game these days with search engines and social media is not how MANY websites/properties/profiles.... It's the quality and effective utilization that matters. Although artists/musicians never really got that wrong, but make sure you do something! (perfectionism vs. procrastination = NEITHER. Do the best you can in the time you give yourself to work on this, and focus on getting as much done as you can.)

Online Communities

If there are forums and online communities that you are a regular in, or have been there for some time and have gotten to know people, why not share new content with them? Keep them informed, and be sure to post links to your websites with "anchor text" (if available) in your signature.

Conclusion

You now understand why and how, so go start building some links. You can start by leaving a comment/question/suggestion below!

Again, when I was referring to targeted keywords for search engine traffic, I'm referring to bridging the topic of your post to something that someone who may potentially be interested in you or your music would be searching for.

This essentially pulls in traffic that you may have otherwise never would have gotten by being clever and putting a little forethought into your blog posts.