Grizzly's Website (for guitar fans)

[Grizzly]

I now have a website (www.MichaelMurrayGuitar.com) which features some recordings of me playing classical guitar (if you like Spanish guitar the first recording by Turina is very flamenco-like). Since it takes a lot of work putting the site up I wouldn't mind getting some traffic (tell all your friends too).

I am still struggling to get listed on the search engines so if anyone has any tips they would be welcome. Google and MSN list my site if you type in michaelmurrayguitar.com but not under any key words. Of course this is not very helpful because if you know the address already you do not need to do a search for it. Both Google and MSN have crawled my site. I am not listed in Yahoo at all yet nor have they crawled the site. I am using metatags and have tried to optimize the site for search engines as much as possible. Maybe it is just a matter of time but I would like to get listed as soon as possible. The website has been up for three weeks.

[Marc]

I'm a classical guitar fan (dabbled unsuccessfully myself) and will definitely check out the clips once I get some computer speakers. Thanks for posting this.

[Sigma]

I listened to a couple of the songs and I sent the url to my mom.

[Daniel]

That's funny, I also passed the link on to your mom.

Oh!

Swooshide

[Sigma]

quote:Originally posted by Daniel

That's funny, I also passed the link on to your mom.

Oh!

Swooshide

Mom jokes? For shame Daniel... for shame... [:0]

[DJT]

Sorry Grizzly, I wanted to reply sooner.

Interesting stuff. I'm a huge fan of classical music, but I'm not crazy about classical guitar. It's alright in small doses, I guess. I listened to all your recordings, but that's enough for one sitting (no offence, the playing was excellent to my (untrained) ear ).

I really like the layout/navigation and content of your site. One thing I'd suggest is to change the font to something like Verdana (the font you are reading right now), which looks more professional (especially relevant if you are trying to sell your services) and generally more modern than the default Times New Roman (which has that personal-homepage-from-1995 look).

As far as Google is concerned, apart from good content the best thing you can do is get other sites (preferably on the same topic and the bigger the better) to link to you. Basing their ranking largely on how sites link to each other was the major innovation that allowed Google to become the top search engine. You can read about this and get other guidelines straight from Google here, and Wikipedia has a bunch of other info and links here (you can skip the technical math stuff unless you know university-level algebra ). There are many third-party sites with many different tips based on additional details revealed and assumed about Google's system, but personally I would just stick to the general guidelines.

I don't know much about the other engines, but I imagine they can't be all that different. I see that Yahoo has now found you.

[Sigma]

Your site comes up when I typed 'Michael Murray classical guitar', but I couldn't get it using any other word combinations.

[Grizzly]

Thanks for your tips DJT. If I remember right you work in the computer industry. What field of computers do you work in? I hadn't given much thought to the font but I have tested it out and I agree the verdana does look better. I will at least change the font of the front page and use it for new pages. I tried to design the site so that it is simple and easy to navigate. I find a lot of websites have graphic displays that are cool the first time you see them but afterwards just irritate and make the site much harder to use. I think most people just want to get the information they need as quickly and easy as possible. I have thought about having the recordings come on automatically when the page is opened but I am worried that this will make the site hard to access for people with older slower computers and without high speed internet. Do you have any opinion on this?

I am now listed under various key words on all three important search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo was the last to crawl my site but the first to list me under key words which means they compile their database much faster than the other two. Yahoo and MSN seem to rank in a similar method but Google is different, ie. I have similar rankings under my keywords in Yahoo and MSN but not Google. There is also a difference in my rankings on Yahoo.com and Yahoo.ca and in general I rank better on the .com. I am happy with my rankings on Yahoo and MSN but not on Google so I have to redesign the mainpage a bit since Google is the most important search engine. The keywords I am aiming at have Montreal in them so this is probably the reason Sigma didn't find the site with other combinations. Once I start focusing the site less locally I will have to redo the keywords and it will be much more challenging to get ranked under things like "guitar" or "classical guitar". I can see in my statistics how people found the site and there are some interesting keywords. For example I rank 11th if you type in "Shakespeare's direct descendents". Someone found me using these search words which come from my recordings page where I refer to Shakespeare's relationship to John Dowland and Bach not having any direct descendents.

In the month of January I had 690 unique visitors (people are only counted once regardless of how often they visit) from 22 countries. The number of visitors was highest from 1.USA 2.Canada 3.Australia 4.Germany. I have had visitors from every continent except Africa. It is kind of cool thinking about people on the other side of the world listening to my recordings and reading my articles. It is not as difficult designing the website as I thought it would be but preparing the content is very time consuming. I have had quite a few people come to the site from this forum. Thanks for visiting and I appreciate any comments or critiques about the site.

[Gian-Luca]

I enjoyed the photos with all of the bearded gentlemen, with you in the (what look's like a) Saarbrucken jersey. You guys could form a progressive rock cover band quite easily (and of course coming from me that's not meant to be an insult!)

[Grizzly]

That is actually a Shinnik Yaroslavl jersey. Usually it gets confused with Inter Milan as even the striping is similar. There are more soccer teams than colours combinations. Scanning photos for the website has made me realize how many pictures I have of me in that jersey as I don't want people to think I only wear one shirt. Whatever material it is made of it is the most comfortable soccer shirt I have ever worn. The other guys are all jazz musicians so if we formed a progressive rock cover band it would have to be free form improvisational covers which would probably fit in well with the progressive rock genre anyway.