Working With Hop Till You Drop
Harnessing the power of the internet
Choosing the right keywords
"Keywords" are the common classification words typed into the search box of search engines such as Google by visitors trying to find information about a particular product or service. When optimising a site to enable it to be found in search engines by prospective clients, the first task for the webmaster is to put himself in the position of those clients. He needs to determine what specific words they might commonly search on to find the product.
If a site markets one particular product, the keywords that will drive traffic to that site can be very specific. For a company like Hop Till You Drop promoting live music - a rather more nebulous product - it's nowhere near so easy. If you examine the marquees that scroll across at the top and bottom of this page, you will find some of the keywords for which this site is optimised. There are quite a few!
The importance of PageRank
If you type the word "music" into the search box of www.google.co.uk, it returns 3,250,000,000 results. To receive traffic to your website on that particular keyword, you need to be in the top ten of a very long list. This will place you on the first page. There is very ittle point in being buried further back. No-one will find you there.
Google returns at the top of its list the sites it considers to be the most relevant for each particular search query. In order to determine the hierachy in which to list them, it allocates each individual site a PageRank. To see what PageRank Google awards websites that you visit, you will need to acquire the Google Toolbar. It's available free from the Google website and you can download it here: http://www.google.com/options/. It will display the PageRank value at the top of the screen.
After you've downloaded the Google Toolbar, make a search on "wedding music UK" in www.google.co.uk. At the time of writing, Hop Till You Drop is on the first page, in fifth position. If you click on the link to the site, you will find that it has a PageRank of 4.
Linking to Hop Till You Drop
If you already have a website, we will ask for a weblink from your site to the Hop Till You Drop site in return for the listing we will give you. In the eyes of Google, links to a particular site from other websites act like "votes" for that website - the more votes, the higher the PageRank. High PageRank increases the chances of being att or near the top of the list for relevant keywords, thus attracting a greater number of interested visitors to the site. More visitors means more gigs for everyone.
The exact wording of the link is very important. Google gives added weight to keywords used in the link when determining the relevance of the website the link points to. Here's the wording we would like you to use:-
Hop Till You Drop is a booking agency that provides high-quality Pop, Soul, Funk, Jazz, Classical, Rock, Blues, Irish, Ceilidh, Scottish, R'n'B, Samba and Steel Bands in the UK.
To make the above wording stand out on this page, it's coloured blue. The code below will create black text. To add this code directly to your site, please copy and paste the following text into the chosen page on your site. If you have a webmaster who makes alterations to your website on your behalf, please cut and paste the code into an e-mail, send it to him and ask him to make the inclusion.
Hop Till You Drop is a booking agency that provides high-quality Pop, Soul, Funk, Jazz, Classical, Rock, Blues, Irish, Ceilidh, Scottish, R'n'B, Samba and Steel Bands in the UK.
Check the PageRank of your own band's site after you've downloaded the Google Toolbar. The home pages of many individual bands' websites have a PageRank of at least 2. The higher the PageRank of the individual page the link is placed on, the bigger the vote the link gives to the site it points to. If you can place the link to Hop Till You Drop on your highest-ranking page, it will give this site the best possible boost.
Let's look forward to more excellent music-making:- more gigs for all!
