I am a huge fan of electronic music. I fell in love with it thanks to Aphex Twin, my first real listening to a certain type of music. Before I was only into metal and hard rock. Now I can’t stand that music.
After discovering Aphex Twin world, I discovered a great site: Bleep.com. Bleep was started as reseller for music and films by Warp (a label that I love), and now it became quite huge, having more than 300 labels and tons of artists.
It’s a really simple and cool site, with a lot of amazing music. They did a great work categorizing all the stuff, and you can search for label, artist, featured stuff, pre-orders…
The thing that pisses me off every time I look at the site is that SEO – at least basic things – is totally missing.
So, my question is one, and it’s pretty simple: WHY?
Let’s make some examples.
First: damn Bleep, you have always the same title for all your pages, and NO metadescription at all. In fact, when looking in google.co.uk here is the SERP:
what kind of description is that? Your site is full of beautiful music, but in someway you have to catch user’s attention. And an informative metadescription could be really helpful here. Even the sitelinks are not well done: I will remove “your order” and the podcasts, and play around til I have the major artists or labels as sitelinks. This could help a lot a user to click on your site!
Now, inside the site. I’m looking to buy something from Rephlex records. So, I go through their labels and I click on Rephlex.
The Bleep URL for Rephlex is: http://bleep.com/index.php?page=label_details&labelid=1132 . WTF?
I suggest Bleep to adopt a structure nicer to see and more optimized like : bleep.com/label/rephlex or bleep.com/rephlex. And again, you have to adopt a nice title and metadescription for this page. The title could be something like: “Rephlex – Label | Bleep.com” and the metadescription could be an excerpt of the label’s description you already have in this page (and this is a good thing!).
Let’s see the single item. If I am interested in the last LP by Plug, I click on it.
The URL for this album is: http://bleep.com/index.php?page=release_details&releaseid=33882 . Again, WTF Bleep? look at the URL! wouldn’t be nicer to have something like: http://bleep.com/back-on-time-plug or http://bleep.com/release/back-on-time-plug? and again: the title is always the same as the homepage and the metadescription is not there. You have the possibility to make a title like “Plug | Back On Time | Bleep.com” and as metadescription you can put part of the text you have for describing the album (it’s awesome you try to explain each album, so why not use that description?).
I really hope Bleep.com is going to take some SEO advices to solve these things. You, bleep, have a site that does not need even too much linkbuilding effort, because a lot of people is linking to your products, even sites with quite high DA. So you can really concentrate on onpage optimization. As your fan, I’m suggesting these simple things you can implement, because it’s really ugly to see those bad URLs and no personalized titles and descriptions. In fact, when looking for an album you have, in many cases you are not even in the first page, and this could be even for the lack of onpage optimization.
I tried to reach Bleep even by email, but they never answered me back 🙂 . I am and I will always be a bleep’s fan, but please do something. And if you want to talk to me, please drop me an email and I will be glad to discuss this!
by the way, I have written this post listening to “Come To Daddy EP” by Aphex Twin. Bought where? on Bleep.com, of course 😀
