This week I read a tweet saying:

“MUSICIANS: IGNORE SEO. Unless you're a professional, you will waste your time”

This struck quite a chord because I’ve seen just how powerful SEO can be when it comes to marketing music; especially for developing artists who haven’t built a strong fan base yet.

For those of you going “whaaa?” SEO stands for search engine optimisation and it is the process of making your website, photos and videos receive more views by making them rank higher on search engines.

So in other words, if you’re a blues artist then it’s the art behind making sure that your videos, pictures and website profiles come up when existing or potential fans make searches like ‘blues music’, ‘UK blues artist’, ‘your artist name’, ‘your song names’, ‘blues music in London’ on search engines like Google, Youtube, Twitter or Flickr.

Did I just say Youtube, Twitter and Flickr are search engines? Well we all search for videos, pictures and even tweets on them and so there has to be some algorithm that orders this content based on what we search for, so I guess that does makes them niche search engines.

Now I wouldn’t argue a case this strongly unless I had hard evidence, so here goes.

Last year I was managing an RnB singer called Dean Raven who was relatively unknown and didn’t have a particularly strong fan base. I uploaded a collection of his songs to Youtube and put a song called ‘You and I’ up on Youtube with the title ‘Dean Raven – You and I (New RnB 2009) to see what happened, it received over 18,000 plays.

I looked at the insight analytics and over 80% of those views were from people using Youtube search, and being an unknown artist it’s highly unlikely that almost 15,000 of those people were search for his artist or song name, so by simply tagging the video correctly, having ‘new RnB 2009’ in the title and linking to the video from external sources we made Youtube think that the video was popular and relevant for searches using the word ‘new rnb’ or ‘2009 rnb’, neat huh?

And if that wasn’t enough evidence, I recently attended the Search Marketing Expo London conference and listened to Avi from Sony Music talk about his Youtube strategy, and you can bet that he was banging on about how important SEO is for marketing music videos on Youtube.

So why would someone say it isn’t important?

I guess they don’t understand that hundreds of millions of music fans are searching for music.

My advice advise to you is to take that amazing opportunity and learn how to make your music gain better visibility in search engines.

If you want to learn more about seo for musicians I recently recorded this video from a fellow music marketer talking about the subject. There is also a section on SEO in the online music marketing chapter of The Musician’s Guide to World Domination.

This blog post was written by Marcus Taylor, author of The Musician’s Guide to World Domination