The Difference Between Content Creating And Sharing

Regardless if it's your website or your social media pages, the thing that keeps your fans coming back is new content. New refreshed content is also important in that it influences your search engine rankings, although there are a lot of other factors that play into that as well.

There are actually two kinds of content; content that you create and content that you share. Content that you create includes everything from your music, videos and posts about events, to posts about your latest news.

Content sharing covers all the content that you don't personally create, but think that your audience might find interesting. That includes links to 3rd party sites, trending news stories, music and videos from other artists.

Shared content has two purposes. First, it allows you to continue to post fresh material when the well of self-created material runs dry. Secondly, it provides a reason for your fans to engage and begin a conversation. The key is to use recent or trending material that people are interested in right now.

How do you find this material? We're bombarded with news everyday everywhere from Google or Yahoo News to friend's post on social media, and those are good places to start. Sites like What'sTrending are also good, but adding "trending" to the end of just about any news or social site (like Buzzfeed.com/trending) will give you a variety of topics that your fans may be interested in.

The idea here is that a combination of created and shared content is a way to keep things fresh, keep the search engines happy, and keep those fans engaged.

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Google Now Provides Automatic Song Lyrics

For years dedicated lyric sites have been both the bane and glory of music publishers. If the lyrics were unlicensed, then that was obviously taking money form the the artists that the publisher represented as well as the publisher itself. Of course, if the lyrics were licensed then that was another source of income. As a result, quite a few fully licensed lyric sites like LyricFind and Musixmatch began to dominate the space.

They may be in for a rough time though, now that Google is incorporating lyrics into the results of any search for a song, as you can see from the graphic on the left. The lyrics are now part of Google Play (as you can see here for the Foo Fighters song) and are in a large database that's totally licensed from the publishers. No, you don't need to be a Google Play subscriber to access them.

Many of the current lyric sites are crowd sourced, so you can never be sure if the lyrics are correct or not. With Google's licenses in place, this is no longer the case, plus the lyrics are now easily accessible via the link in the search results.

Why did Google do this, you might ask? For Google, the search experience itself is paramount. You can see this in its rankings, where a page with a good user experience consistently ranks higher one where info is difficult to find. It seems that Google is using the same criteria on itself as well.

A Tip To Improve Your YouTube Search Ranking

Here's a quick and easy tip to improve your YouTube video and channel search ranking from Tim Schmoyer's Creator's Tips over on the ReelSEO blog.

The way that most of us point people, artists, bands and brand to their YouTube channels is by providing a simple URL that looks like this:

http://youtube.com/yournamehere

In my case, my YouTube channel is called polymedia (it's a long story why I don't use bobbyowsinski) so my URL looks like this:

http://youtube.com/polymedia

The problem with this is that both YouTube and Google searches actually looks at it like this:

"http://youtube.com/user/yournamehere", or my my case, "http://youtube.com/user/polymedia"

It seems like such a small thing, but if you add the "user" into the URL yourself, Google ranks your channel higher than if you don't use it. Thus for me:

"http://youtube.com/user/polymedia" will rank higher than "http://youtube.com/polymedia"

Reports are that people who have added the "user" to their URL's have jumped in rankings from in the 20's to the top 3. It doesn't look as nice, but if Google likes it better and will rank you higher, that's the way to go.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Some Tips For Better Video Search Rankings

Recently Metacafe's CEO Erick Hanchenburg gave some tips and best practices that video creators can use to make sure that their videos are easily discoverable by a search engine. They are:

• Make sure the tagging is done well in that all the major characters in the video are properly identified. Misleading tags can cause YouTube to consider it SPAM.

• Don't make the title too generic, since it won't rank highly as a result. 

• Make the title easy to spell because it takes Google longer to learn it unless it gets typed in correctly during a search.

• Cross promote to other videos if possible via links or references.

• Keep it PG-13 if you want to appeal to advertisers.

Don't forget that it's really important to consider anything involving Google searches when it comes to search ranking since that's what YouTube uses for its internal searches (it is owned by Google, after all).

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Do Google +1s Affect Your Search Ranking?

We seem to have solid evidence that posting a lot on social network Google+ affects your search ranking, which is no surprise since it is, of course, owned by Google. That said, just how much does a collection of +1's really affect your ranking?

According to a recent article on Mashable, there seems to be some evidence that Google +1s can at least indirectly lead to a better page rank. The problem is that it's a very indirect affect. The fact of the matter is that anything that leads to increased social sharing (like Facebook Likes) provides a potential jump in ranking. It's not a sure thing, just one of many factors that Google takes into account.

When it comes down to it, good SEO, link building, relevant keywords, and of course, great content seem to have as much to do with page ranking as endorsements like +1. The Google Panda algorithm is extremely intelligent and defies being gamed, so don't make the mistake of thinking that all you need is lot of a single thing to cause a jump in rankings. As with all things SEO, much more to it than that.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.