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You, Your Voice Acting Business and the Web 
Part III
By Chris Wagner, voice actor

Well here it is the final installment of “You, your voice acting business, and the web”.  Now that we’ve covered domain names, hosting services, space considerations, and do it yourself versus hiring a web designer; it’s time to consider the search engines and your content.  Content may be the thing that changes the most often on your site and of course you need to choose your content carefully!  Let’s kick this installment off with search.

Search Engines

Domain name; check! Hosting service; check!  You have your web site address printed on your business cards and use it in your marketing mailings.  Pretty effective way to get the audience you’ve targeted to come and visit your site, listen to your demos, and maybe learn more about you and your experience.  But you want your site working for you even when you aren’t sending marketing mailings out.  What is the best way to do this?

The Matrix…err, the Web is a huge collection of content that can be a real pain to get around.  Heck how do you even find what it is you want?  Well in the beginning there were some sites that acted like phone directories for web sites, and of course there was word of mouth.  Out of that grew the search engine pages; one of the first was Alta Vista.  Then of course there was Yahoo, and eventually the 800 pound gorilla Google.

Submit your web site to the search engine and then it goes to work; opening up your web site and reading it.  Your site will be ‘spidered’ and keywords from your site will be placed in the search engine database.  So the next time someone goes to the search engine and types in words like “voice over” or “voice actor”, “narration” and such, your site should show up in the results.

The results shown will have your site and maybe thousands of other related web sites.  Your competition will be listed right there with you on the page.  That’s not something you can really get rid of; it’s just the nature of the beast.  But there are a few things that can be done to improve your chances of being listed higher in the results. 

First off, you can place a set of keywords inside your website that the search engine spider looks for; you are basically programming the search engine the way you want. 

Here is a brief example of what those keywords look like in HTML: