SEO - For music files

[T-Kai]

I have a question regarding the search engine ranking. What would be the best URL to use with high ranking when someone searches for midis by ARTIST and/or TITLE of the song.

I was thinking of the following :
Option 1 : http://midi.domain.com/MIDI_ARTIST-TITLE.php
+ where for artist or title if it has more than 1 word in the name, I would display it as one (example : Black Eyed Peas; BlackEyedPeas)
Option 2 : http://www.domain.com/MIDI_ARTIST-TITLE.php
+ in case I will not be able to get the htaccess to resolve from a subdomain
Option 3 : http://midi.domain.com/MIDI_ARTISTTITLE.php
Option 4 : http://midi.domain.com/ARTISTTITLE.mid.php
Option 5 : http://midi.domain.com/ARTISTTITLE.mid
+ probably not a good option for mp3s, because mp3s are usually bigger than 1MB, while the site will be just a couple of KBs.

What would be the best option? If you have any other options/suggestions please let me know.

Thank you,
Luka

[Jazzee]

My suggestion would be http://midi.domain.com/ARTIST-TITLE.php

[T-Kai]

Yeah, that is also one of the options.

Any more suggestions and explanations are welcome.

Thanks,
Luka

[Mel]

Option 1 : http://midi.domain.com/MIDI_ARTIST-TITLE.php
+ where for artist or title if it has more than 1 word in the name, I would display it as one (example : Black Eyed Peas; BlackEyedPeas)

If you run the words together like that it will not be parsed by most search engines in the way you want. i.e. if you put the title as blackeyedpeas it will not be parsed for black eyed peas unless you seperate the indivudiual words with dashes.

But that said there is lots more to high ranking that is more important than what you name your subdomains, so my advice would be to not spend too much time on this portion of you optimization.

[T-Kai]

Mel : Thanks for the reply.

Yes, someone mentioned that before, but some sites that don`t have words separated with dashes rank higher on google. But it seems like this is just a coincidence. I checked them and they use a lot of <h1> and other tags which give more weight and therefor higher ranking.

So URL is fine the way I have it? For instance http://midi.domain.com/ARTIST-TITLE.php or http://www.domain.com/ARTIST-TITLE_MIDI.php
Which one would rank higher?

On each page I would also define special TITLE and DESCRIPTION (not so important I know) that matches the page`s content.

If I include word FREE and DOWNLOAD, will the search engine rank me higher if someone does a search for "Black Eyed Peas midi"? Or would it be relevant only if they include "free" and "download" in their search?

Could you give me some more tips?

Thanks,
Luka

[Mel]

If you want to see how the search engines index phrases do a search for the phrases in the search engine. For instance if you search google for blackeyedpeas you will get 2000 results but if you search for black eyed pease you will get 264,000 results.

Search engines only rank for the words in the search term, if someone searches for black eyed peas the words free or download in the page title for instance will not be considered in the rankings. except that they may dilute the keyword density of the title resulting in a lower ranking.

Use unique keyphrases for each page, use them in the page title, meta description and meta keywords tag.

Start your page content with an H tag which contains the targeted keyphrase, and use the same keyphrase early in your first paragraph throughout the page and towards the end of the page. Use your keyphrase in alt tags where appropriate.

IF you want to get high rankings on Google, start collecting links to your pages with anchor text that matches the keyphrase you have targeted for that page.

[T-Kai]

Thanks for your quick and helpful reply Mel.

I also read most of the articles on your website and am still reading them. You provide the best guide for search engine optimization I have ever read. You should point every newbie who wants to do search engine optimization to it. Thumbs up for you

There is one part in your message that I don`t understand though :

"IF you want to get high rankings on Google, start collecting links to your pages with anchor text that matches the keyphrase you have targeted for that page."

What exactly is anchor text and could you give me an example of a site using that kind of optimization? English is not my primary language so with certain technical words I feel lost.

Thanks,
Luka

[Mel]

Anchor text is text that is used as the link to a page such as;

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com">put your anchor text here</a>

Google uses the anchor text as one of the ranking factors for the page the link points to, and can be a great help in bettering your Google rankings.

[T-Kai]

Mel : Thanks. So basically that means I should do link exchanges with other webmasters so that they link to me with specific anchort text that matches my site`s content. Is that correct? This is one of the options I will certainly do and am already doing some of these.

What about if I do a section called Site Map and link every page that is part of my site with target anchor text. Would that improve the rankings as well?

[PhilC]

The benefit of link text applies to the sites internal pages too.

Site maps are good for ensuring that spiders can find every page in the site. If you make one, do use targeted link text as Mel suggested. But also use targeted link text for as many of the other links within the site as you can.

[samer]

the best will be midi-artist-title since underscores aren't recognized by SE (JS' article.)

[T-Kai]

samer : So, not even google can recognize underscores? What about "%20" tag instead of an underscore? Search engines don`t crawl sometimes if you use "%20" tag I believe. What are your thoughts on this?

Luka

[Mel]

I suggest that if you have questions on what Google does and does not index, you can satisfy yourself with a few quick searches on Google:

Search for - (dash) > You get not results (google does not index this as a valid text character)

Search for _ (underscore) >You get 28,500,000 results (google does index this character as valid text)

Search for %20 (html space) you get 310,000,000 results and perhaps more importantly the results for searchs containing the number 20 are in the top of the results)

Search for "%20" (using quotes to search for the phrase) >You get 479,000,000 results but interestingly you still get the numeral 20 results in the top ten)

Now put your thinking cap on and figure out why you still get numeral 20 results when you search for the term with quotes.

[T-Kai]

"Now put your thinking cap on and figure out why you still get numeral 20 results when you search for the term with quotes."

Because "%" as well as "-" is an unsupported text character. So if we sum up, the best would be to use dashes, right? If I search for Eminem Without Me and display http://domain.com/Eminem-Without-Me.html that would work the best right? What about http://domain.com/Eminem%Without%Me.html? Would search engine make a ranking difference or not?

Luka

[Mel]

Google will parse Eminem-without-me.html as three different words, (they treat the - the same as a space) but I am not sure how they would treat %.

Maybe some more (re)searches are in order?