How to Put My Music Into a Search Engine

The first step in getting your music into a search engine is to let the search engine know where your music can be found. This involves uploading your music to a website, and then optimizing that website to make it search engine friendly. This process is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To follow the steps below you need only a basic knowledge of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and a website registered with a web host provider.

Instructions

1

Create a copy of your music file, giving it the same title as the name of your song.

2

Upload your music file to your website using any free FTP software.

3

Create a new page on your website with the name of your song as the page title.

4

Write between 200 and 300 words about your song. This is the content of your web page. Put the name of your song in the first sentence and somewhere in the middle. Putting your song name too often may be seen as "keyword stuffing" and could cause your page to be ignored by the search engines.

5

Include a hyperlink to your music file at the end of the last paragraph about your music, using the name of your song as the clickable link. For example, you could write, "Here's a free download of my rendition of 'Blackbird'." The word "Blackbird" would be the clickable link to your song file "blackbird.mp3". This tells the search engine that your page is relevant to the name "Blackbird".

6

Copy the first two or three sentences of your web page content. Paste these sentences into the "description" meta tag of your website. This tag is located in the top of the HTML code of the web page between the "head" and "/head" tags.

7

Write the name of your song in the "keyword" tag of the page located in the top of the code, usually beneath the description tag. Use your own name or the name of your band as the second keyword, using a comma to separate the keywords.

8

Edit the home page of your website by adding a hyperlink to the new page using the name of your song as the link to that page.

9

Go to the search engine web page where you want to list your music and submit your website if it is not already listed. Links to the Google and Yahoo! submission pages are listed in the Resources section below. Most web pages listed by Google and Yahoo! are automatically picked up by other search engines. If your website is already listed, there is no need to resubmit your web page.

10

Wait several days, then go to the search engine and type the name of your website and the name of your song into the search field. It may take up to a couple weeks for your website to be listed if it is a new website, or if you do not update your website frequently.

11

Type the name of your song in quotation marks into the search engine once you know your website is listed. Then scan the listings for your web page to see how well your song ranks in the search results.