Music Promotion & Marketing

Improving Your Website – Top 10 (Ten) Quick Tweaks

Posted on August 24th, 2009 in Search Engine Optimisation, Website Management & Improvement.
Tags: better website, increasing conversion rates, Search Engine Optimisation, seo, website changes, website improvement, website optimisation

Following on from a previous post on why your band needs a website I have included some handy tips to help you make your band, DJ or artist website more effective and, potentially, successful. This isn’t to say these tips are specific to music websites but will help anyone looking to create a good quality and user friendly website in general.

1. Provide quick links to your contact page so anyone can get in touch quickly and within a click or two. If someone finds it difficult to get in touch quickly and easily they’re likely to just go away. Ensure your contact page is reachable within as few clicks as possible from anywhere else in the site.
2. Make sure your website works. Broken links can be frustrating for the user and won’t give a good impression. Make sure everything works. You can perform a check for broken links at http://juicystudio.com/services/linktest.php
3. Make sure you cater for people that are pressed for time – as most people are – particularly A&R staff. Busy people are quick to navigate away from a page if they can’t get what they want quickly and they’ll soon go elsewhere without battering an eyelid.
4. Interlink your pages well. Make sure every page, particularly for smaller sites, is accessible from any other page. You can do this through a common navigation menu or by hyperlinking parts of the text to other pages.
5. Don’t use text within images. These cannot be read by the search engines. By making as much of the content of your site ‘crawlable’ or ‘spiderable’ will increase the chances of your website being indexed within the search engines, allowing for greater potential hits. If you are unsure if all of your web page can be seen by the search engines try this handy ‘spider simulator’ tool at http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php
6. Don’t allow your music to play as soon as the website loads. Make it a choice. Not only does this cause a slower load rate it can also be annoying when it isn’t requested or expected and, depending on the environment, may not be ideal.
7. Make sure your pages contain unique content. Duplicate information is filtered from numerous large search engines and won’t do you any favours in terms of gaining visibility within the search engines. Don’t copy the text straight from your social networking profile as one of these pages is likely to be ignored.
8. Don’t use lavish fonts. Stick to the simple fonts that work across all operating systems and browsers. Just because you find a nice font that works on your machine it doesn’t mean it will look the same on another. Typical serif and sans-serif fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet and Comic Sans should be fine.
9. Break longer content up into smaller chunks. Long pieces of text can seem daunting to the reader and may decide not to look at that page if they are pressed for time. Help make things easier to read and help the user skip to the bits they want to read by splitting the content up into headings and sub-headings. Healthy bite-sized chunks.
10. Highlight key terms within your text. Many people skim-read on the internet so highlight the bits you want them to see first in bold. They should be able to know what your page is about just by reading the emboldened text – great for impatient users or those reading in a hurry.

If you have any other helpful tips regarding website design and usability issues feel free to discuss them below.