I’ve heard lots of stories and theories about how to get your website indexed by Google and the other major search bots, (which basically boil down to Yahoo and MSN) in rapid fashion and my record up to a while ago, from uploading a new website to seeing search bots/crawlers activity on my server has been two days.

That record was trashed recently when the Google bot came a calling (crawling?) within two hours of my first post going up on the Musicbizhacks site. I got a hit from a search query, “how do i get my cd distributed on itunes” that someone Googled, minutes after I’d posted this.

That’s pretty good going by any standards and is a good indication of how much faster and efficient the indexers have become. How did they do that? One simple method actually. I posted an incoming link on my MySpace profile and another in the header of my music directory, Buzzsonic.dj and that was it.

So. Anyone who tells you you need to submit your site to a search engine, or tries to sell you a submission service is living in the past. Though you can still submit just to make sure of course.

Cant get anyone to link into your website? (basically all you need is an inbound link from another site that has already been indexed). Then add a link to one of your social network profiles (you have one right?). It really is that simple.

Related Reading

Search Engine Watch (Searchenginewatch.com)
How To Get Indexed By Google (Problogger)
5 Ways To Get a New Site Indexed Within 48 Hours or Less (SEONoobs.com)
Search Engine Optimization Forums (Sitepoint.com)
Search Engine Optimization (Digital Point)

We recently signed up for the new (ish) Facebook feature, music pages to promote the 99th Floor Elevators. Network with us on Facebook, here.

Our other label artist the Buzzsonic have a MySpace page here . Both sites are places you have to really work on to promote, as a relatively obscure artist, which means promoting your pages everywhere you can and networking with everyone.

Before I started producing dance music I used to strut my stuff as the lead singer of an alternative rock band called the Fruit Eating Bears, who’s main claim to fame seemed to be the ‘unpredictable’ nature of the live gigs (ie: things tended to depend a lot on how much we’d been drinking that day). We also discovered another Fruit Eating Bears which meant we had to ditch the name as well.

In our rare sober moments we got a bit of a following in our local area of South Yorkshire, UK, played the legendary Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, London, appeared on Gary Crowley’s Radio London show, Demo Clash and even had (the then) Phonogram Record company A&R guy ringing us.

Getting to the point a little, we recorded a four track EP which never saw the light of day but which we have decided to get uploaded to iTunes to see how things go. So, starting today the ‘Uptempo Tantrum EP’ experiment begins. We decided to use the band name, the Buzzsonic seeing as its the only thing we could think of that hadn’t already been used for a band.

I got a contact to design the cover (which looks pretty neat) and am signing up for distribution using Tunecore, whom I also used for my 99th Floor Elevators remix project release.

So, step one. Encode hi-bitrate MP3s from my CD master using the CDex Lame encoder, add tags and upload to Tunecore as we speak. Now to put together some kind of readable PR sheet!

To help the project with some much needed PR, one of the tracks, ‘Remember’ has been picked up by an independent film company for usage briefly in the film, ‘Behind The Scenes of Total Hell’. BTSOTH apparently gets it premier at the Curzon Cinema in London sometime next month and is the work of film maker Andy Wilton. I think the film is going straight to DVD but there’s supposed to be a CD tie in which should be good.

The release is set to appear May 13th on iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, EMusic and Amazon MP3 worldwide.

Related Reading

Fruit Eating Bears (MySpace)
Get Your MP3 Tags In Order (Wired.com)
Bob Bakers Indie Promotion Blog (Bob-Baker.com)
Cyber PR (Ariel Publicity)

This position kind of fluctuates most weeks but if you search for ‘Florida Travel Resources’ in Google, one of our projects, iExploreFlorida.com

usually hovers around one of the top 5 results. We’re very pleased at the sites progress as we have spent only a small amount of time on ‘Organic SEO’ and getting relevant content and keywords throughout the website. Its still a work in progress but its a key term we wanted to be doing well in and its working well.  Further more we’re doing well in the Yahoo (number 8 today) SERPs  and MSN Search (number 4 today).

I licensed two of our tracks by the 99th Floor Elevators, ‘Hooked’ and ‘I’ll Be There’ to a UK dance label Toolbox Recordings though I held onto the US. territory to exploit the tracks over here in the US. The tracks are available on most of the major UK dance music download platforms including TrackitDown, Ministry Of Sound, 3 Beat, DJ Download, Mixmag, XPress Beats and Vicious Circle MP3 (and a few more) though not on popular US. platform Beatport (yet).

Turns out there’s some kind of market battle going on between the UK distributors and the US market leader. Anyhow, meantime we’re trying out the Snocap store which is a simple sign up process for artists and labels alike and enables you to cut and paste a music store on just about any website.

It looks kind of OK and the files are in the consumer friendly MP3 format. There’s viral marketing built in and you’re able to email the store to friends or paste it into your own website (if you really like the music I guess!). Anyway, right now we’re trying it out on our MySpace page and on the 99th Floor Elevators blog to see how it works.

Related Links

DanceDownload Alliance Announced To Fight Beatport (FutureMusic.com)

Buzzsonic Media is a tiny tech idea space based in Florida. Our main focus is on niche music, travel and technology web properties. Our main projects right now are the ‘music biz 2.0′ site, Buzzsonic.dj and the Florida travel website iExploreFlorida. We have a number of ideas in germination, including Englandr.com - a site aimed at Americans vacationing in the UK. AandRCast.com - A music spotting service for programmers, Floridr.com - a site for Brits heading to Florida and Buzzsonic Records, a digital record label that is fair to the artist ! More news later.