Here's something obvious: most band members are good (or at least decent) musicians. Here's something that may or may not be obvious, but is probably true: most band members are not great web developers. Chances are, they spend most of their free time working on their primary craft: writing songs, practicing, and networking. Which leaves very little time for them to improve their online presence.

While some of the larger bands can afford to hire a professional web designer to build their web site, smaller bands either do it on their own or find a friend of the band to build it for them. For those smaller bands, chances are good that they've never heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Many professional web designers do not even keep up to date with SEO/SEM. Why is it important to your band? Most people use Google to find sites to go to. So if your band does not show up in the search results, people will not be able to find your site.

How Search Engines Work

This is a very simplified explanation. Search engines crawl through the web, following links and indexing the pages they come across. Every link that points to a page is like a vote saying that the page is an authority. They take into account the words in the link, what the linking site is about, and a bunch of other complicated stuff to figure out what's going on.

How to Rank Higher for a Term

So to improve your ranking in the search engines for a term, you need links pointing to your site with that term as the link text. If your band's name is "Suppository Hallucinogen", every time someone links to your page using that term, search engines will bump you up the rankings. Of course, it helps to have that term used many times in the text of your homepage, but the links are the most important part.

So how do you get more links? Here's a few ways that will definitely help:

1. Ask your friends to link to you. If you're friends with any other bands, ask them to link to your site. Many bands have a links page on their site, just waiting for you. Of course, you should return the favor.
2. Sign up for a Del.icio.us account, and bookmark and tag your site. The new big thing on this here Interweb is social bookmarking. Basically, you tag a page with various terms (Dallas, band, music, etc) and other people can search for those terms. So every member of your band should link to your site. Bookmark some other sites while you're at it to get some networking going.
3. Get a StumbleUpon account. StumbleUpon is a great way to see some cool websites and kill some time. The idea is that people vote on a site, thumbs up or down. You click a button that takes you to a random page, so you can stumble upon some really cool sites.
4. Submit yourself to Mozilla Directory. It's a human-edited directory of websites. Links from it are considered very authoritative.
5. Make sure that your MySpace page links back to your homepage.
6. Submit your website to TexasGigs.com. Not only will you get a link, they might just take some interest in your band.
7. Make sure that your homepage URL is on everything: Your CD, your fliers, your business cards, your t-shirts, your CafePress thongs, your demo CDs, etc.
8. Most importantly: give people a reason to come back to your website. This means constant updates. You need to be in constant communication with your fans. Let them know the status of the CD that you're recording. Tell them about upcoming shows, not just on your calendar, but in your blog. Why are you excited about the show? Who are you playing with? If you're taking some time off from playing shows, let people know what's going on, so they don't think that you've broken up.
   
   While these tips won't immediately get you higher rankings and tons of traffic, they can't hurt.