Seeking out New Resources and Spreading the Word

Tradition can be a good thing, and there are some great classic resources on French horn playing out there. However, there are a percentage of horn players and teachers that are stuck in their own little world of playing and teaching. This was part of what I was getting at in the end of the post on the Emmy nomination of the Breathing Gym Daily Workouts video when I yesterday wrote,

While I know many brass teachers are at least generally familiar with The Breathing Gym, from a recent conversation with a brass teacher at another university I know that there are brass teachers that are completely unaware of The Breathing Gym and The Brass Gym by Pilafian and Sheridan…. These are products to encourage your colleagues to know better. They can be keys to reaching the next level; spread the word.

If you are reading this site you are probably not one of those players stuck in the past or in your own little horn world, as you are out on the Internet actually seeking out new information and resources on the horn.

Development of this new site has been extremely interesting for Bruce and me. On one hand it has been incredible to see our old sites transformed into Horn Matters, and we look around it and know that it is a fantastic resource. But on the other hand, as of now it is down in the page rankings at Google. We are not sure why this is and we are doing what we can to correct this situation. From my own experiments I would say on the whole the site shows up better in Yahoo. So while I know Google has become the dominant search engine to the extent that the word has become a verb (people say they will “Google” something, not “Yahoo” something), if you are a fan of Horn Matters you might at least for now consider using Yahoo if you want the site to show up better in your searches.

For us the lower search rank is not unexpected at this point but a bit of a bummer. With the old sites if you were looking for pretty much anything on the French horn you basically for sure would end up at one or both of our sites pretty quickly. We should come back up in the ranks soon. The internal search function here at Horn Matters is also handy, try it out as there are more than 800 articles in the site to access that you will not find nearly as easily from Google.

That all said the actual traffic now is still pretty solid. We know we have a great group of regular readers and we do appreciate you!

Looking at recent stats there is a word of mouth factor as well and something else that is not as easy to define. Right now as I write this post the top ten cities in terms of number of page views in the past 500 page views are in order:

1. Melbourne Victoria Australia
2. Los Angeles California
3. Saint Paul Minnesota
4. Phoenix Arizona
5. Cincinnati Ohio
6. Denver Colorado
7. Rexburg Idaho
8. Appleton Wisconsin
9. Regina Saskatchewan Canada
10. Madison Wisconsin

I find it very interesting to see whole areas of the country that seem to not have heard about Horn Matters, for example we as of now get very few hits from Florida and Indiana. Hello, any horn players out there in Florida and Indiana? My guess is that players there are not on the Internet looking for outside information much, or perhaps mostly use Google to do so.

Ultimately we just have to trust that this site is a great resource for horn players around the world. Spread the word! Tell your friends and students, and if you have a site or blog link us. Thank you for your support for Horn Matters.