Re: new website draft 8: almost giving up

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 05:00:57PM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Op donderdag 13-08-2009 om 11:05 uur [tijdzone -0300], schreef Han-Wen
> Nienhuys:
> > I side with the general recommendation that Google gives, which is to
> > focus on building a good website, and trusting that the resulting
> > search ranking reflect reasonable metrics on quality.

I must admit that one of the recommendations from the official
google guidelines is:
----
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and
make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
----

> Right.  My suggestion was that new users will probably search
> for "free music software".  I seem to be the only one thinking
> this (ah, besides the finale/sibelius marketing people).  So...
> what do you think people will search for?

Right.  The website currently shows:
LilyPond is an open-source music engraving program, devoted to
producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. This free
software brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to
computer printouts.

I consider the "free music software" question to be finished.


As for the general point -- I don't think that lilypond.org is
particularly well-linked.  For example, a day or two ago I
happened to be on the Werner Icking Music Archive, which describes
lilypond as the successor to MPP and that we "use TeX but is not
related to MusiXTeX".

Perhaps AFTER the new website and 2.14 are out there, we should
have a publicity drive where we ask our users to look for links to
lilypond.org and send polite updates for that text to the relevant
webmasters.  Everybody says that the most important thing for the
website rankings are the links TO your site, not the actual site
itself.

But this should only happen after we have the new site done and
ideally translated into one or two languages.  So let's get back
to work and leave this bikeshed behind.

Cheers,
- Graham