I started the Buzzsonic music industry directory about ten months ago after importing the database from an older music directory at my other blog at 99th Floor Elevators. The old script I was using there, PHP Links was getting a little dated and had these unwieldy session ids and a creaking admin area.

I upgraded to a much sleeker, streamlined script called Indexu which has proved to be much easier to look after, edit and customize. I was thinking that old school directories (including the granddaddy of them all DMOZ) are just that, old school. Well, you’d think. But even in the age of a million and one bookmark organizers, social networks and web 2.0 hype, I have still to find anything that has made the Buzzsonic music directory obsolete.

That would be backed up with the fact that the visitors have kept increasing month by month so there is certainly a demand. Its not millions, far from it, but the first months visitor count of just over 600 uniques is now closer to 5000 unique visitors a month and 50,000 page views.

So, I’m painstakingly updating the directory entries right now, but with 3000 entries in there already its going to take a while. Hopefully we’ll have things tidied up pretty soon. We’re also working on music industry specific RSS news aggregator, which has been heavily ‘influenced’ by the brilliant PopUrls. Watch out for that one as the early version (Beta?), should be around in a couple of weeks, its called MusicFizzlr.com.

I’ve heard lots of stories and theories about how to get your website indexed by Google and the other major search bots, (which basically boil down to Yahoo and MSN) in rapid fashion and my record up to yesterday from starting a new site to seeing search bots/crawlers activity on my server stats has been two days.

That record was trashed yesterday when the Google bot came a calling (crawling?) within two hours of my first post going up on the Musicbizhacks site. And I got a hit from a search query, “how do i get my cd distributed on itunes” that someone Googled, minutes after I’d posted this.

That’s pretty good going by any standards and is a good indication of how much faster and efficient the indexers have become. How did they do that? One simple method actually. I posted an incoming link on my MySpace profile and another in the header of my music directory, Buzzsonic.dj and that was it.

So. Anyone who tells you you need to submit your site to a search engine, or tries to sell you a submission service is living in 2002! Though you can still submit just to make sure of course. Cant get anyone to link into your website (basically all you need is an inbound link from another site that has already been indexed). Then add a link to one of your social network profiles (you have one right?). It really is that simple.

Related Reading

Search Engine Watch (Searchenginewatch.com)
How To Get Indexed By Google (Problogger)
5 Ways To Get a New Site Indexed Within 48 Hours or Less (SEONoobs.com)
Search Engine Optimization Forums (Sitepoint.com)
Search Engine Optimization (Digital Point)