Best Music Blog On The Entire Web

I was sitting with my friend Lydia yesterday when she asked me a very common question. “How do I get my site to rank better?”

Lydia is certainly no clueless lump of clay when it comes to competing on the web. She is a graduate of one of the top universities in the world, she has a few years of experience in a professional marketing and public relations firm, and was a writer at Austin City Limits.

She wanted to compete on the search query music blog. Even if you have of the best music blog on the web, that’s a tough term to compete on. She writes a lot, adding well written, compelling content multiple times a day to her blog.

Her music blog is linked to by a number of high authority sites, she had a nice variety of domains linking to her, the site has been around a couple of years.

So what could be the problem?

It is a common problem when someone becomes the personification of their brand. Most of the incoming links were links to either the name of the music blog or Lydia’s name.

There were over 35,000 links to sunset in the rearview (or some variation), and another few thousand withe her name as the anchor text. There appeared to be exactly zero with the anchor text music blog.

So what’s a girl with a kickass music blog suppose to do?

1. Create a standard boilerplate blurb you can give to other people that want to link back to you that has the words and phrases that are important to you. This can help eliminate the awesomely bad practice of people writing about your site then linking to you with the word “here” – ugh.
2. Add a standard footer to your outgoing email that is rich-text and links back to your site the way you want. This will also help people who are writing about you and want to link back to you.
3. If you have strong relationships with other sites that have linked to you in the past, take the time to write to them explaining what you’re doing and ask them to help you by modifying their links. You may be surprised how well this one works. When you ask people straight up to help you, and give them a plausible reason, they almost never say no.
4. Add your feed to the music section of Alltop.
5. Check your competition using advanced search operators like allinanchor to see what other pages are being linked to with terms like best music blog and then deconstruct what they’re doing.
6. Submit your music blog to the Best of the Web’s music blog category.