Your Band Name Is A Keyword

In preparing for this post, I took a second to look for a band that I could be completely unbiased against so as not to offend fans, but to solely use their band name as the focus of the article. In my defense, I’m an average fan of AFI and won’t discuss the music today. But after browsing the Guitar World website, AFI stood out as a great example for 2 good reasons: 1. AFI is a shortened version of the full band name “A Fire Inside”, and the acronym can stand for plenty of other things. 2. As a well established band, I’ve seen countless fan sites, links from record label sites and thousands of backlinks from the most reputable music portals out there. A good band name can really make or break your chances of making it as I mentioned earlier, but for internet marketing’s sake, it can easily bury you. But a deciding factor may be how easily you can rise in search engines under your band name. Try searching AFI in Google, and as of today you will see the following…

Since a newly formed band isn’t going to have a Google music link for quite a while, we’ll have to ignore this for now. But notice the first result in the organic listings. The American Film Institute. Some may argue the domain is an exact match to the search, but we’re dealing with two powerhouse internet entities here. Your still-playing-for-beer band can’t compete. If AFI can’t out rank everyone for their new name, you won’t either. Consider how commonly used the word or words making up your band name are. The more you know about your band name, the more the internet world probably has written about it. Unique combinations of words will help ensure you’re the only credible internet site for that result. For my examples sake, “A Fire Inside” may have been a better choice to promote themselves under, because the direct competition isn’t nearly as strong and has far fewer results. With all of this in mind, remember you are trying to make your music and material as publically accessible as you can. With band marketing today, you can’t afford to be buried in the search engine results when word-of-mouth can be your best ally. If you can’t secure the perfect domain that a screaming fan at a show will remember 100% of the time as mentioned in part one, you’ll need the power of search engines to get them to your site.