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I set out to build a website to support what I was doing on the The Music Tech Guy UK YouTube channel. I have built websites in the past, but that was along time ago, in fact nearly 20 years ago and I had forgotten how painful a process this is.
The first incarnation of the The Music Tech Guy UK's website was built during the tail end of lockdown as a holding place for me to develop content for. I adopted the Waynes World mantra 'If you build it they will come'
The problem was you didn't and I got a little bit disenfranchised with my website and basically just let it languish for two years.
Then at the start of this year I started researching why I was basically getting zero traffic to The Music Tech Guy UK website.
What do the 'Guru's' say?
The 'guru's' call out two key issues:
Quality of content - Are you publishing quality content. Well I was publishing no content as I was dis-enfranchised with the website. And I shouldn't have been as this is part on my brand. So to rectify this I restructured the website and published some new pages. Go check them out: https://www.TheMusicTechGuyUK.com
Search engines index and recommend your content - This opened my mind up to the whole concept of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. These are a series of processes that you need to follow when publishing your website to make them more search engine friendly. And when I opened up the SEO dashboard for Google, I noticed that al the pages that I had published were not indexed and some had been rejected by the search engines.
The Action plan
So like any good consultant while I was in Africa lying by the pool a month or so back, I started researching what I need to do to at least get a half competent 'The Music Tech Guy UK' website.
Content
For content I came up with a series of content publishing goals:
Decide if I was going to continue with WIX as a publishing platform for The Music Tech Guy UK? I decided to continue with this platform as I did most of what I wanted at the moment. But I would continue monitor the platform as my requirements develop. Tick.
Intrinsically link the The Music Tech Guy UK's YouTube channel and Website together. This would be based around the instrument projects that I undertake and would be presented under 'The Gear' tab. Tick.
Commit to start publishing blogs again. Blogs are important to allow me to speak to you, those that might follow me and my thinking. So I am going to try an publish a blog once per week to The Music Tech Guy UK's website. If you are reading this then Tick.
Service the The Music Tech Guy UK's website on a regular basis. This means publish or augment content in a structured way. This means that during the month I will work on new content that I want to publish and then push this content to the website on the 3rd Friday of the month. Deal with any issues that escaped the testing process and have it live on the 3rd Saturday of the month. Which reminds me I better get going on this months release.
Oh and quite important, once you publish your website you will start getting SPAM e-mails from people promising to fix your website's issues. These in general are scams to extract money from you or get hold of your website / domain credentials. STEER CLEAR. If you need help use a platform like Fiver or Upwork where you can get reviews of previous engagements.
Actually at the point of publishing this blog April's release has just been released to the World Wide Web 😉. No going back on this one!
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is really a science and honestly this is what has really taken the time. My advice to anyone that is looking to build your own website is once you have written your content, build a publishing workflow / process which includes:
Decide what key word you want to use to identify your content. This is what you will use in your SEO settings to allow people to find your content.
Ensure the key word appears in the heading of the page you are publishing.
Ensure that you use the key word in your content. But not too much. According to the Guru's the old method of plastering the key word everywhere actually switches search engines off. The frequency is about once per hundred words.
Keep the content short and ensure your message is in the front to middle of the content. Many search engines will only index x characters or x words. The internet is getting big.
Write a meta tag that has the keyword in and describes your page in a summary format.
If your platform has SEO tools use them as reference. But I have to say these are only a guide. Google will accept a page for indexing but Bing throws errors on the same content!
Summary
I am a failed musician not a webmaster. But running The Music Tech Guy UK's website and YouTube channel it seems I have to be the a jack of all trades and master of non!
About the Author
Jon describes himself as a frustrated musician with a passion for the electronic instruments that help him and other musicians be creative. He started playing keyboards in his late teens and re-ignited his passion and built a new studio following his seperation.
About the Blog
The Music Tech Guy UK's Blog, Website and YouTube channel were started to share Jon's experiences and views on the industry at large and how these effect the small musician. Plus technical tips how to configure and maintain the equipment he owns.
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