SEO – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

Experiences on semantifying a Mediawiki for the biggest recource about Chinese rock music: rockinchina .com

Rene — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 09:38:45 +0000

During my trip in China I was visiting Beijing on two weekends and Maceau on another weekend. These trips have been mainly motivated to meet old friends. Especially the heads behind the biggest English resource of Chinese Rock music Rock in China who are Max-Leonhard von Schaper and the founder of the biggest Chinese Rock Print Magazin Yang Yu. After looking at their wiki which is pure gold in terms of content but consists mainly of plain text I introduced them the idea of putting semantics inside the project. While consulting them a little bit and pointing them to the right resources Max did basically the entire work (by taking a one month holiday from his job. Boy this is passion!).
I am very happy to anounce that the data of rock in china is published as linked open data and the process of semantifying the website is in great shape. In the following you can read about Max experiences doing the work. This is particularly interesting because Max has no scientific background in semantic technologies. So we can learn a lot on how to improve these technologies to be ready to be used by everybody:

Max report on semantifying

Max-Leonhard von Schaper in Beijing.

To summarize, for a non-scientific greenhorn experimenting with semantic mediawiki and the semantic data principle in general, a good two months were required to bring our system to the point where it is today. As easy as it seems in the beginning, there is still a lot of manual coding and changing to be done as well as trial-and-error to understand how the new system is working.
Apart from the great learning experience and availability of our data in RDF format, our own website expanded in the process by ~20% of content pages (from 4000 to above 5000), adding over 10000 real property triplets and gaining an additional 300 thousand pageviews.
Lessons learnt in a comprised way:

DBPedia resources are to be linked with “resources” in the URI not with “page”
SMW requires the pre-fix “foaf:” or “mo:” or something else for EACH imported property
Check the Special:ExportRDF early to see if your properties work
Properties / Predicates , no difference with SMW
How to get data to freebase depends on the backlinks and sameas to other ontologies as well as entering data in semantic search engines
Forms for user data entry are very important!
As a non-scientific person without feedback I would not have been able to implement that.
DBPedia and music ontology ARE not interlinked with SAMEAS (as checked on sameas.org).
Factbox only works with the standard skin (monoskin). For other skins one has to include it in the PHP code oneself.

Main article

The online wiki Rock in China has been online for a number of years and focusses on Chinese underground music. Prior to starting implementing Semantic Mediawikia our wiki had roughly 4000 content pages with over 1800 artists and 900 records. We used a number of templates for bands, CDs, venues and labels, but apart from using numerous categories and the DynamicPageList extension for a few joints, we were not able to tangibly use the available data.
DPL example for JOINT between two Wikipedia Categories:


category = Metal Artists
category = Beijing Artists
mode     = ricstyle
order  = ascending

Results of a simple mashup query: display venues in beijing on a Google Map

After having had an interesting discussion with Rene on the benefits of semantic data and Open Linked Data, we decided to go Semantic. As total greenhorns to the field and with only limited programming skills timely available, we started off googeling the respective key terms and quickly enough came to the websites of the Music Ontology and the Semantic Mediawiki, which we decided to install.
Being an electrical engineer with basic IT backgrounds and many years of working on the web in PHP, HTML, Joomla or Mediawiki, it was still a challenge to get used to the new semantic way of talking and understanding the principles behind. Not so much because there might not be enough tutorials or data information out in the web, but because the guiding principle is somewhere but not where I was looking. Without the help of Rene and several feedback discussions I don’t it would have been possible for us to implement this system within the month that it took us.
Our first difficulty (after getting the extension on our FTP server) was to upgrade our existing Mediawiki from version 1.16 to version 1.19. An upgrade that used up the better part of two days, including updating all other extensions as well (with five of them not working anymore at all, as they are not being further developed) and finally getting our first Semantic Property running.
Upon starting of implementing the semantic approach, I read a lot online on the various ontologies available and intensively checked the Music Ontology. However Music Ontology is by far the wrong use case for our wiki, as Music Ontology is going more into the musical creation process and Rock in China is describing the scene developments. All our implementations were tracked on the wiki page Rock in China – Semantic Approach for other team members to understand the current process and to document workarounds and problems.
Our first test class had been Venue, a category in which we had 40 – 50 live houses of China with various level of data depth that we could put into the following template SemanticVenue:

{{SemanticVenue
|Image=
|ImageDescription=
|City=
|Address=
|Phone=
|Opened=
|Closed=
|GeoLocation=
}}

As can be seen from the above template both predicates (City) and properties (Opened) are being proposed for the semantic class VENUE. Semantic Mediawiki is implementing this decisive difference in a very user-friendly way by setting the TYPE of each SMW property to either PAGE or something else. As good as this is, it somehow confuses if one is talking with someone else about the semantic concept in principle.
A major problem had been the implementation of external ontologies which was not sufficiently documented on the semantic mediawiki page, most probably due to a change in versioning. Especially the cross-referencing to the URI was a major problem. As per Semantic Mediawiki documentation, aliases would be allowed, however with trial and error, it was revealed that only a property with a domain prefix, e.g. foaf:phone or owl:sameas would be correctly recognized. We used the Special:RDFExport function to find most of these errors, everytime our URI referencing was wrong, we would get a parser function error.
First, the wrong way for the following two wiki pages:

Mediawiki:smw_import_mo
Property:genre

Mediawiki:smw_import_mo:

http://purl.org/ontology/mo/ |[http://musicontology.com/ Music Ontology Specification]
activity_end|Type:Date
activity_start|Type:Date
MusicArtist|Category
genre|Type:Page
Genre|Category
track|Type:String
media_type|Type:String
publisher|Type:Page
origin|Type:Page
lyrics|Type:Text
free_download|Type:URL

Property:genre:

[[Has type::Page]][[Imported from::mo:genre]]

And now the correct way how it should be actually implemented to work:
Mediawiki:smw_import_mo:

http://purl.org/ontology/mo/|[http://musicontology.com/ Music Ontology Specification]
activity_end|Type:Date
activity_start|Type:Date
MusicArtist|Category
genre|Type:Page
Genre|Category
track|Type:String
media_type|Type:String
publisher|Type:Page
origin|Type:Page
lyrics|Type:Text
free_download|Type:URL

Property:mo:genre:

[[Has type::Page]][[Imported from::mo:genre]]

The ontology with most problems was the dbpedia, which documentation did not tell us what the correct URI was. Luckily the mailing list provided support and we got to know which the correct URI was:

http://www.dbpedia.org/ontology/

Being provided that, we were able to implement a number of semantic properties for a number of classes and start updating our wiki pages to get the data on our semantic database.
To utilize semantic properties within a wiki, there is a number of extensions available, such as Semantic Forms, Semantic Result Formats and Semantic Maps. The benefits we were able to gain were tremendous. For example the original JOINT query that we had been running at the beginning of the blog post with DPL was now able to be utilized with the following ASK query:

{{#ask: [[Category:Artists]] [[mo:origin:Beijing]]
|format=list
}}

However with the major benefit that the extension would NOT be broken after setting the inline query within a page. Dynamic Page List breaks the , rendering a lot of information lost. Other examples of how we benefitted from semantics is that previously we were only able to use Categories and read information of joining one or two categories, e.g. Artist pages that were both categorized as BEIJING artists and METAL artists. However now, with semantic properties, we had a lot of more data to play around with and could create mashup pages such as ROCK or Category:Records on which we were able to implement random videos from any ROCK artists or on which we were able to include a TIMELINE view of released records.

Mashup Page with a suitable video

With the help of the mailing list of Semantic Mediawiki itself (which was of great help when we were struggling) we implemented inline queries using templates to avoid later data changes on multiple pages. That step taken, the basic semantic structures were set up at our wiki and it was time for our next step: Bringing the semantic data of our wiki to others!
And here we are, asking ourselves: How will Freebase or DBpedia actually find our data? How will they include it? Discussing this with Rene a few structural problems became apparent. Being used to work with Wikipedia we usually set the property same:

Owl:sameas (or sameas)

On various of our pages directly to Wikipedia pages.
However we learnt that the property

foaf:primaryTopic

is a much better and accurate property for this. The sameas property should be used for semantic RDF pages, i.e. the respective DBPedia RESOURCE page (not the PAGE page). Luckily we already implemented the sameas property mostly in templates, so it was easy enough to exchange the properties.
Having figured out this issue, we checked out both the freebase page as well as other pages, such as DBpedia or musicbrainz, but there seems to be no “submit RDF” form. Hence we decided that the best way for getting recognized in the Semantic Web is to include more links to other RDF resources, e.g. for our Category:Artists we set sameas links to dbpedia and music ontology. For dbpedia we linked to the class and for music ontology to the URI for the class.
Note on the side here, when checking on sameas.org, it seems that music ontology is NOT cross-linked to dbpedia so far.
Following the recommendations set forth at Sindice, we changed our robots.txt to include our semantic sitemap(s):

Sitemap: http://www.music-china.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom
Sitemap: http://www.rockinchina.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom

Going the next step we analyzed how we can include external data on our SMW, e.g. from musicbrainz or from youtube. Being a music-oriented page especially Youtube was of particular interest for us. We found the SMW extension External Data that we could use to connect with the Google API:

{{#get_web_data:
url=https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&q=carsick+cars&topicId=%2Fm%2F03cmgbv&type=video&key=Googlev3API&maxResults=50
|format=JSON
|data= videoId=videoId,title=title
}}

And

{{#for_external_table:
{{Youtube|ID={{{videoId}}}|title={{{title}}} }}

{{{videoId}}} and {{{title}}}

}}

See our internal TESTPAGE for the live example.
Youtube is using its in-house Freebase ID system to generate auto-channels filled with official music videos of bands and singers. The Freebase ID can be found on the individual freebase RESOURCE page after pressing the EDIT button. Alternatively one could use the Google API to receive the ID, but would need a Youtube internal HC ID prior to that. Easy implementation for our wiki: Include the FreebaseID as semantic property on artist pages within our definitions template:

{{Definitions
|wikipedia=
|dbpedia=
|freebase=
|freebaseID=
|musicbrainz=
|youtubeautochannel=
}}

Voila, with the additional SQL-based caching of request queries (e.g. JSON) our API load on Google is extremely low as well as increasing speed for loading a page at our wiki. Using this method we were able to increase our saved YOUTUBE id tags from the original 500 to way over 1000 within half a day.

A big variety of videos for an act like carsick cars is now available thanks to semantifying

With these structures in place it was time to inform the people in our community not only on the changes that have been made but also on the additional benefits and possibilities. We used our own blog as well as our Facebook page and Facebook group to spread the word.

Link baiting for Musicians Bands – The perfect band website: part 4

Rene — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:10:53 +0000

Several years ago I read an excelent article by Jim Westgren (a Sweedish SEO) on link baiting. He kind of opened my eyes what online marketing and search engine optimization is all about! It is not so much about getting backlinks with force on other sites or showing annoying advertising. It is about beeing in the discussion! And how do you do this? As Google always says: “Produce good unique content”
Jim’s list with link baiting techniques are just another way how to produce good content and make it more interesting so people talk about you! And when people talk about you, you become relevant!
When first reading the list I realized right away how this would perfectly fit to musicians and music bands. But when I showed this list to some band members they didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. It came to my mind: Jim’s list had to be translated to a language understandable for musicians. So here you go with Jim’s list and my translation of it.
(remember that link baiting as a musician ist much easier than for bloggers because everytime you say something people will talk about you because you are famous. So this is not so much about really getting backlinks but thinking about how to present yourself as a musician on the web)

Make a valuable resource (lists, special reports, history of, how to, etc.)

This obviously translates to: Put your music and videos on your website. And especially while first publishing this kind of stuff put it nowhere else. No MySpace and of course no Facebook. Fans / Webzines and so on will talk about you but it will be your website they are linking to. So you get the relevance points from the search engines and not Facebook or MySpace. Why would you make those websites better when you can improve your own? I just realize that this point is so crucial that I will craft a standalone article about where to put your music on the web. So long you can see my similar article about sharing music

Interview (e-mail/phone) prominent people and publish it.

well you are already famouse and prominent. But why do you need to be on MTV to be interviewed. Of course because you can reach a new audience. Guess what. Asking your fans to ask you questions making your own video interview on your homepage is fun, challenging and will drive back those fans and if their like it their friends on your page. Some other blogs / mags might talk about it. Give it a try!

Build a useful tool

All right you got me here. I don’t see any translation for the musician. Maybe you could build an app for the newer smartphones but still distribute it over your website.

Write an interesting article

As a musician you are kind of an oppinion leader. Why don’t you comment on other music you like. You are obviously an expert on your topic and it will be very interesting for your fans and the fans of other bands to read your reviews and comments on their music. Just Imagine Lady Gaga had her own blog where she reviewed other music. Damn this would attract many people.

Run a newsworthy ‘event’ such as a contest

That is a great one. You are going on tour or you are organizing the tour? Well local bands will be interested to open the concert for you. Have contests for this. Not a contest where they just have to make their fans click somewhere on your page. But making a bandcontest can be fun and other bands will try hard to get this slot on your shows!
Have your fans create youtube videos with one of your songs and give them the chance to win something really cool. You have a personal Gig on their birthday party!

Test something new that has not been done before

Well this might sound hard but as a musician you should be creative. When Radiohead first put their album on the web for free download they tested how it would work and a lot of people like me still talk about it. The crucial part is that it has not been done before. Now if I reference to this event / happening I always use the radiohead example even though many others also did it.

Be the first in doing something on the internet

This one is very similar to the one above. The internet is a huge playground just experiment around. There are many possibilities.

Write something controversial

It is sad but true. But In the entire timephase of promoting In Legends record most of them have been sold on april first when we did our somewhat funny somewhat controversial april’s fool telling the world that the band members have been replaced by some hot chicks because it’s a better visual effect for our live shows. not even the news that our album is out resulted in more comments. That’s kind of surprising.

Be the first to write the latest news in your niche

Easy score. Eerytime you have a press release you do this by putting it on your website and then you contact the mags with a short mail and state that you put the press release on your page. they will eather reference to your page or copy the release. You do not put the press release on Facebook or any other community. The only thing you can do there is to make an update saying you put something on your website.

Be the first to expose a scammer

well the scammer could be within the industry but remember you might loose a friend or close some other doors. But hey maybe there is this critic you always had an open bill with. Or this guy organizing a festival you don’t agree with. Since your connection is already bad why not making this public and getting a profit out of it.

Disagree with an authority

Again think about record labels / festival bookers. What would happen if Metallica posted an article on their page stating that this years Wacken festival had a bad or boaring line up? Well at least I would really enjoy the following and ongoing discussion.

Write some funny humor

Funny things happen to musicians. While recording the music while beeing on tour. In day life. Just think about stories that most people lough at and share them. Or remember the april’s fool we did.

Make an interesting picture

Well this could relate to promotional pictures. But there could also be pictures of fans or of you taking a sh** behind the tourbus. People are attracted by pictures and you certainly have a lot. On the internet quality does not have to be as high as in print mags. More important is the activity.

Be the first to research and document something

I guess this is one of the few points that holds best for bloggers.

Make a theme, plugin or piece of software

This things could relate to your music or artwork or what so ever.

Make a tool that others can put on their sites but that links to you

the best thing would be some kind of concertfeed or newsfeed. If you really aggregate all reviews on your music that apear on the web you could also use those as a content and still link to them and say tool powered by “your band page”

Make a joke about a known person

Well you have to know the person and everyone has to understand it. But I still remember Children of bodom playing umbrella at wacken open air. That was pretty funny. I guess you could transfer ideas like this to the web but in the case of musicians it would not be my first choice.

Make a resource that is just in time for a major event

you finnaly got your record release world wide or play the gig on this huge festival? well you better get an mobile app or some other cool stuff on your page to support it!

Write an outrageous theory and back it up with logics

Another point that fits best with bloggers. Anyone has an idea? Feel free to use the comments.

Write useful comments on something that is happening

it is what people do on facebook. Writing the tour diary or some other things about what is going on in the studio. Well do it on your page and attract the people to your page! not on facebook!

Give something valuable for free

Well I have a whole article about sharing music! I encourage you it is your very best marketing tool!

Coin a new acronym in your niche and get people to talk about it

Well this is what you do. You create new music or a new style. Van Canto have been the first to do a capella metal and now people talk about a capella metal and know right away they have to look into van canto.

Become an expert in your niche and write valuable information

as a serious musician you already are an expert and since you have fans your information will be valuable.
I guess you see the pattern that comes from Jim’s ideas and how they transfere to music. If you quote this list please also consider to link back to Jim since he really is the initial creator of this list. My article is just an interpretation of this list for musicians.

Facebook is overrated for bands and musicians

Rene — Wed, 25 May 2011 19:23:07 +0000

Since I will hold a session at this years future music camp about search engine optimization of band websites and the importance of the homepage for a bands online marketing I was preparing everything and looking up some statistics. With my band In Legend we have been right away very active on Facebook but also created a great video for Youtube and especially in the beginning we used myspace a lot to introduce our music to a new audience. So I was curious where most of our traffic came from during the last year. Our main focus for sure is Facebook but I was surprised to see that we received twice as much traffic from myspace and Facebook only ranked number 5!

Remember that 40% of our search engine traffic comes from lyric search and search for downloads of our music. this means 20% of our overall traffic comes from this souce. Compared to 6% traffic from facebook we see that doing search engine optimization correctly for our band page drives three times more attention than our activities on facebook!

I have to admit that in the last couple month we received more traffic from facebook than myspace. But we stopped to be active on myspace which could explain the recent decrease in traffic from myspace.
Since we really put a lot of effort in Facebook marketing I wanted to see how well we bring our fans to the store. So The following statistic shows you on which channels we have been able to drive our fans to amazon (by tracking every link we spread)

Where the traffic to our amazon sales comes from

Again facebook is very poor! With direct mail and our homepage we have been able to send 4 times as many people to amazon than via facebook. Well the interesting part would be the conversionrate. Maybe for some miracle the conversionrate on Facebook was much higher than the other channels. Unfortunately I can’t present detailed statistics on that (Amazon doesn’t share them!) but from the daily sales figures and my knowledge from when we used which channel to promote our album I have the feeling that the conversionrate on facebook is about the same as on our Website and direct mail!

Conclusion

To me facebook seems to be highly overrated and overvalued. Our sales would have been much less If we did not have a great customer relation management / Newsletter and homepage. Maybe I should call this thing the facebook bubble! What is your experience?

band website search engine optimization – backstagepass!

Rene — Tue, 24 May 2011 08:17:00 +0000

As everyone knows I am doing quite a lot search engine optimization for my band In Legend. After the new records Ballads and Bullets has been released last friday and I had already optimized the website so it would rank #1 for lyric search and also quite well if people search for illegal downloads. Now as a followup to my article Band Page SEO I decided to share some statistics with you about search engine optimization for websites of bands and take you kind of backstage!

Rammstein SEO vs In Legend SEO

First have an impression why this is actually important! watch in fullscreen

50 % of queries for our band name

Almost 50% of all search requests that lead to our page is search for our band name i.e. “in legend” the landing page of course would be www.inlegend.de. Quite interesting is that it doesn’t rank #1 due to the fact that legend is a highly amigious keyword. Anyway the absolut number of clicks that come from this query indicates how popular the band is.
All the other search requests distribute in the longtail but yesterday I took the time and grouped them by hand:

22% of all queries for illegal downloads

Antoher 22% of all search requests are searches for illegal downloads. In most cases the landing page is optimzed to the keyword
ballads n bullets mp3 download by in legend
On that page (and also in this article!) we spread link power to the following higher specialized long tail illegal download pages:
Rapidshare, torrents, filesharing, warez, emule, bit torrent, streaming, megaupload, sendspace, direct download link, p2p, edonkey, napster, megashare, ftp
If people search for this they will in any case find some chances to listen all our songs in an online stream. We also offer them verious ways to share email adress or become facebook fans. c.f. http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/how-to-take-care-of-your-fans-%E2%80%93-the-perfect-band-website-part-2/
So if you want to help a musician to fight illegal downloads you might want to share this post

17% of all queries for In Legend lyrics

Next 17% of all searches go for lyrics of our songs. Instead of going to some lyric portal the fan is taken to the website of our band where we also offer merchandise, albums and have the chance to start a communication with the fan.
note that each song has its own page optimzied to the corresponding keyword.
01. Heaven Inside [4:23]
02. Pandemonium [3:50]
03. Elekbö [4:44]
04. At Her Side [3:29]
05. Vortex [3:40]
06. Life Is Up To You [3:22]
07. The Healer (Inclusive Remedy) [5:56]
08. Yue [5:01]
09. Soul Apart [3:06]
10. Stardust (feat. Inga Scharf of Van Canto) [3:59]
11. A Hanging Matter [4:40]
12. Prestinate [4:01]
13. Heya [4:31]
14. Universe [3:24]

because we communicate in great way that we posted our lyrics on our website google can find them. we also rank above all established lyric portals

10% for the Longtail

this alreads sums up to 90% of our search traffic!
The rest would be some longtail keywords. Almost all of them lead to our message board.
I am pretty satisfied with this result. Though I am still amazed that every one out of five queries is about illegal downloads. Especially if you consider that a lot of searchers might not even click to the official band website even though it ranks high! Which means that the black number should be much higher. It is nice to see that my theory according to which most bands throw away potential by not optimizing their page for lyrics and downloads holds true!

What are the 57 signals google uses to filter search results?

Rene — Tue, 17 May 2011 22:58:16 +0000

Since my blog post on Eli Pariser’s Ted talk about the filter bubble became quite popular and a lot of people seem to be interested in which 57 signals Google would use to filter search results I decided to extend the list from my article and list the signals I would use if I was google. It might not be 57 signals but I guess it is enough to get an idea:

Our Search History.
Our location – verfied -> more information
the browser we use.
the browsers version
The computer we use
The language we use
the time we need to type in a query
the time we spend on the search result page
the time between selecting different results for the same query
our operating system
our operating systems version
the resolution of our computer screen
average amount of search requests per day
average amount of search requests per topic (to finish search)
distribution of search services we use (web / images / videos / real time / news / mobile)
average position of search results we click on
time of the day
current date
topics of ads we click on
frequency we click advertising
topics of adsense advertising we click while surfing other websites
frequency we click on adsense advertising on other websites
frequency of searches of domains on Google
use of google.com or google toolbar
our age
our sex
use of “i feel lucky button”
do we use the enter key or mouse to send a search request
do we use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through search results
do we use advanced search commands (how often)
do we use igoogle (which widgets / topics)
where on the screen do we click besides the search results (how often)
where do we move the mouse and mark text in the search results
amount of typos while searching
how often do we use related search queries
how often do we use autosuggestion
how often do we use spell correction
distribution of short / general queries vs. specific / long tail queries
which other google services do we use (gmail / youtube/ maps / picasa /….)
how often do we search for ourself

Uff I have to say after 57 minutes of brainstorming I am running out of ideas for the moment. But this might be because it is already one hour after midnight!
If you have some other ideas for signals or think some of my guesses are totally unreasonable, why don’t you tell me in the comments?
Disclaimer: this list of signals is a pure guess based on my knowledge and education on data mining. Not one signal I name might correspond to the 57 signals google is using. In future I might discuss why each of these signals could be interesting. But remember: as long as you have a high diversity in the distribution you are fine with any list of signals.

Bandpage SEO – The perfect Band website: part1

Rene — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:08:43 +0000

This is the first part of a series of articles about the perfect band website. It consits of one very important aspect of a band’s website which would be SEO also know as search engine optimization. There are some great resources on the Web about all the technical stuff related to search engine optimization. That is why I will not talk about how to craft your titles, headings and sites structure. I assume that you are a musician or record label working together with a partner that is responsible for your web presence. This Article is supposed to help you to ask the correct questions and point out the correct goals for your bandpage SEO. The focus will be on keyword research and about how to choose good keywords.

Basics you need to understand:

The Internet is one of your distribution channels to attract new fans at relatively low cost. It also gives you the chance to sell your products (cds, mp3’s, merchandise, concert tickets,…) with the highest possible profit margin.
Your website is the single most effective marketing tool you have on the web. Years ago every artist needed to be on myspace. Today it is called Facebook and do you know what will be tomorrow? In opposite to those portals your website will be perpetual and should be the center of all your online activities. It doesn’t make sense to have music streaming on myspace and give news corp your greatest treasure and raise your myspace page over your webpage. Remember News Corp not only doesn’t pay the musicans licence fees for streaming but they also drive traffic from your website to myspace.
Most important: People don’t look on your website for information. They look on google for information! You might be lucky and someone who wants to buy merchandise or a CD will type in your band name and then clicks on your website in order to find more information. But chances are much higher that he will type in your name and the word merchandise and then browse to the first results of the Google search result page. So will your band page appear in that case?

Usual difficulties of Search Engine Optimization

Very simplified speaking search engine rankings are calculated by the amount of back links (which means the number of other websites linking to your website) the anchor text of the back links and the site’s structure, format and keywords. A shop or everyday website faces the very hard challenge that not many other Webpages or magazines talks about them on the Internet. In these cases on page optimization, link building and link baiting – which needs a lot of effort, time and money are mandatory.

The special case for bandpages:

Since a music band is likely to have fans and gain attention by media websites it usually gains tons of back links (we remember the hard stuff for your search engine rankings) in a very short time. The best thing is: Most links will contain your band name as an anchor text making it the most relevant result for this keyword and also for moste keywords related to it as long as you place your content with a good structure and follow basic formatting rules. Your webmaster should be aware of these things. If not, well… you could change?
So your question should be: Which keywords do my fans type into Google that should always lead them to my homepage? Once you know the answer to this question due to your fame and relevance on the web any webmaster should be able to optimize your page for these keywords.

Keyword list for your band’s page SEO:

Since bands do not seem to have the experience to choose the good keywords and bandpage SEO is as explained really 90% the choice of keywords I will now give you a list of keywords that your page should be optimized for.

Your band name +…
merchandise
shop
ticket
concert
tour
album
reviews
lyrics / song text
mp3
download
video
listen
CD
tabs / chords / notes
buy

Note, since the internet is full with piracy anyway it would be wise at this point not only to win these keywords but also to provide the fans with the content they are looking for. This means put up the tabs and chords of your songs. They are on the web anyway and other people earn a lot of advertising dollars.
futher more (maybe in combination with some of the keywords listed above):

name of your band members
song titles
titles of your records
Names of the band you are on tour with / Name of the tour

and if you want to be really cool:

your band name + name of the releases in combination with:
rapidshare
bit torrent
megashare
Napster
…

There is much more to band page optimization (e.g.: photos, videos, social media optimization, crm, reviews, community building, newsletter…) and i will continue to write about it. If you do not know how to optimize for those keywords have a look at the In Legend website. If you need help for implementation feel free to contact me! If you think I am missing some points feel also free to tell me via comment. And please give me feedback on my Question: Do you think band page SEO is useful / important to online music marketing of bands?