I’m going to start at the beginning, with one of the first things that a band does: Choose a name. Now, this may be redundant in most cases, as you probably already have a band name that you’re happy with, but if it’s not too late to change (your band is, like, Metallica or something) then heed these words, as you could really benefit further down the line.

So you want to name your band ‘Apple’. Let’s think about this one for a minute. Isn’t there a company named Apple too? Well, they’re not a band so no problem, right? Well, when naming your band, it’s probably a good idea to go type your shortlist into Google. The term ‘apple’ is not only dominated by the ubiquitous technology company, but it’s also one of THE most fiercely contended terms by every man and his dog on the internet. Unless you become VERY popular VERY quickly by other means (basically you are Arctic Monkeys, which is, incidentally a great band name for SEO) then you’re always going to have trouble ranking for search terms relating to your band name.

Another gotcha is using non-standard characters in your band name. Avant garde black metalers <code> may have a cool name, and make fabulous noises, but they’re a bitch to find in search engines and ecommerce sites using the correct spelling of their name. They’re also making life harder for bloggers like me who have to use special characters in subject lines if we want to use the correct spelling. What’s worse is that the angle brackets “<>” are widely used in internet markup languages like HTML, and this will confuse the hell out of many web applications and in some cases could actually cause the site to malfunction on less well built sites. This is not the end of the world, and I’m sure <code> are doing quite well for themselves (they at least have a record deal) but you’re just making life hard for yourself at a time when you least need it.

The best choice for a band name from an SEO perspective is probably a made up word (eg. Skronkgornak – I couldn’t think of any real bands off the top of my head, so I just made on up) or a mis-spelling (eg. Def Leppard). Assuming someone else didn’t beat you to it, it’s really easy to ‘own’ these sorts of terms with very little effort and get almost immediate results. This is one of the reasons I chose the phrase “the inevitable nose” as the title for this blog. There were a few medical related pages ranking for this term, so it only took me a week to rank #1 for that term in Google, and only a couple more weeks to get 2, 3 and 4.

So stick your preferred name into Google before commuting to it and make sure you’re not going to be buried from day 1.

Tags: SEO

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Resources for Bands, SEO, SEO for Metal Bands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.