There has been plenty of discussion in the blogosphere about blogs and search engine optimization (SEO). Google in particular seems to love blogs. Blogs are rich in content, heavily linked, with links that tend to be contextual, and without much in the way of code bloat or gratuitous flash animation. In short, blogs are search engine friendly out-of-the-box.
But what about SEO’ing a podcast, the blog’s newest cousin?
Podcasting (where anyone can become an Internet radio talk show host or DJ) presents unique opportunities to the marketer/content producer that blogging does not. I expound on this a bit more in my recent MarketingProfs article but the benefits of podcasting from an SEO standpoint wouldn’t seem as obvious. Podcasts are usually audio content, so you don’t get all this rich textual content that the search engine spiders can snarf up. You also don’t get the rich inter-linking that happens with blogs because you can’t embed clickable URLs throughout your MP3 files.
Nonetheless, I believe you can SEO your podcasts. Here’s how:
- Come up with a name for your podcast show that is rich with relevant heavily searched-on keywords.
- Make sure your MP3 files have really good ID3 tags — rich with relevant keywords. ID3V2 even supports comment and URL fields. The major search engines may not pick up the ID3 tags now, but they will! And besides, there are specialty engines and software tools that already do.
- Synopsize each podcast show in text and blog that. Put your most important keywords as high up in the blog post as possible but still keep it readable and interesting.
- Encourage those who link directly to your MP3 file to also link to your blog post about the podcast.
- Consider using a transcription service to transcribe your podcast or at least excerpts of it for use as search engine fodder. Break the transcript up into sections. Make sure each section is on a separate web page and each separate web page has a great keyword-rich title relating to that segment of the podcast. And, of course, link to the podcast MP3 from those web pages. There are many transcription services out there, where you can just email them the MP3 file or give them an URL and they send you back a Word document. Here’s a partial list of transcription services.
- Submit your podcast site to podcast directories and search engines such as audio.weblogs.com.
- Let people in your industry, such as bloggers and the media, know that you have a podcast because podcasting is quite new and novel. It will be more newsworthy and link worthy than just another blog in your industry.
- Don’t just get up on your soapbox. Have conversations with others, in the form of recorded phone interviews, and podcast those as well. Pick people who have great reputations on the web and great Page Rank scores, and ask that they link to your site and to your podcast summary page.
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of tactics. It is simply meant as a catalyst for creative thinking. SEO, in particular the link building aspect, isn’t about just following a set list of formulae. It is about creatively thinking outside the box and differentiating yourself in ways that make your site eminently more links worthy than your competitors.
Search Engine Optimization for Podcasts
By Grant Crowell | March 9, 2006 Podcasting is comparatively new, though there are already numerous podcast search engines and it's important to optimize your audio files if you want listeners to find your spoken content.
A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, December 5-8, 2005, Chicago, IL.
Podcasting—recording an audio or video file and uploading it to the web so that users with iPods or other media players can download the content—is a hot subject. Panelists on this session focused on how best to prepare and optimize podcasts for search engines.
Podcasting and search
"Podcasting is an interesting challenge from a search standpoint," said Joe Hayashi, Senior Director of Product Management at Yahoo "It is not only audio, it's also video. It's also a subset of audio—it is meant to be consumed in a particular way. Podcasts are a subset of multimedia, and the techniques to really find a podcast need to scale across multiple domains."
In some ways, podcast search engines are similar to traditional search engines except that podcast search engines crawl the Web constantly for rich media files. "If we come across things like podcasts or any other audio or video file," said Suranga Chandratillake, Co-Founder and CTO of Blinkx, "we ingest those into our index and allow people for people to search for that content on either our own site or thru various syndication partners."
"Most people are still wondering what a podcast is and have trouble not only finding it," he said. "So we put a lot of energy into not only the search (finding) aspects but the consumption aspects as well. We have done a variety of things—search, editorial, a browsing system and a tagging system for podcasting."
"We're really leveraging the community out there to provide great content to people," Hayashi continued. "We provide a lot of community tools: a tagging system, a ratings and review system—this lets us discover high quality content. The tagging system also influences search results."
Metadata and Podcasts.
In the past, many multimedia search engines relied heavily on metadata to determine relevancy. Now these search engines are able to utilize speech recognition to determine the content of an audio file.
"Podscope is the first podcast search engine that actually looks for and listens to every spoken word in a podcast," said David Ives, President and CEO of TVEyes. "We believe that speech recognition and actually cracking open the audio file is essential for finding relevant podcasters. We have a solution called 'pinpoint audio' which enables us to play an audio snippet to determine the relevancy of that term within a podcast."
"Metadata alone is not a sufficient indexing criteria to find relevant podcasts," he said.
"I also agree that just metadata is not enough, said Chandratillake.”The average podcast today, which is about 15-20 minutes long, only has 25-30 words describing it. There is no way that short description contains everything that is in the 'meat' of podcast. That is also why we use speech recognition to understand more completely what it’s about."
Podcast optimization tips and guidelines
Speakers offered the following tips and guidelines for optimizing podcasts:
- Promote only one feed. "Many podcasters create a podcast, then move over to a different content management system, promote a new RSS feed, and wind up with all of these different feeds out there for every podcast," said Dick Costolo, CEO of Feedburner. "You want your content to be easily discovered. Promoting one feed makes it easy for search engines to know where your content is."
- Optimize the audio file. A lot of people listen to a podcast on their computer as well as MP3 players.
- Close the findability gap. "Optimize a landing page for each episode of your show, as well as your category page," said Amanda Watlington, owner of Searching for Profit. "Provide subscription information on the landing pages that's very visible."
- Build correct and valid feeds. "Validate your feeds with feed validator tools," said Watlington. "Remember that iTunes does not redistribute. So you must build a separate feed for iTunes. I like to promote doing 3 separate feeds: a 2.0 feed, a media feed and an iTunes feed."
- Include a transcript or summary. Whether or not it is a transcript or a summary will depend on the podcast's time span. "If you're giving just a little short tip, that's one thing," said Watlington. "Typically, a summary is all you need for your landing page, a nicely optimized page that covers the podcast's high points."
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