Submitting Your Web Site in Directories

Once you have optimized your site for search engines, your next step would be to submit it to the search engines and web directories, so that your site is indexed by search engines and visited by many. Are you confused with search engines and directories?, you are not alone; most people do!. Lets see what we can do to clear your confusion ...

Search Engines and Directories - How they differ?

A search engine is a system that enables users to search and retrieve information from the web. Usually, search engines use a software program, generally referred to as crawlers, to index web pages. Various search engines use complex algorithms to index and categorize the web pages. On the other hand, web directories contain a collection of web pages organized into categories and sub-categories. The main difference between directories and search engine is that search engines use software to automatically index the web pages; whereas in a directory, web sites are organized into categories by people.

Why submit in directories?

If you have submitted to at least one directory and have ever checked the traffic to your site from web directories, you would have noticed that it is negligible comparing to the traffic coming through search engines. This fact prompts you to ask, "Is it worth submitting my site in directories?". Before answering that, lets analyze the benefits of listing in directories...

First, directories bring targeted traffic. Though the traffic generated through directories is very limited, this traffic is from people who, by their own choice, come to our site by browsing through categories in the directories. These people are more likely to remain in our site for long and more likely to be our prospects. Another important benefit is that these directories are considered "expert" sites by search engines. So, submitting a site in directories increases its chance of getting good rank in search results. Isn't it worth submitting your site in directories?

Why submit in directories?

Directories can broadly be classified into "Free Directories" and "Paid Directories". There are many free directories available on the web, such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, AbiLogic, Gimpsy, JoeAnt, etc. Usually the free directories take a long time to list a submitted web site. So be patient and constantly check these directories for your site. The paid directories list a submitted site usually within a day! If you go for the paid option, you can consider the following directories: Arielis, BOTW, BlueFind, Microsoft bCentral, and GoGuides.

• Make sure your site has no broken links, no broken images, no missing pages, no typos. Have a thorough review of your site.
• In the description field of the submission form, provide a readable sentence. That is, do not stuff this field with keywords, because the editor will find it and reject your site. Similarly, avoid marketing language such as "the best", "Most powerful", etc. because the editor will edit the sentence which may result in removal of your genuine keywords.
• Be careful in selecting a suitable category in the directory. If you do not find a fitting category for your site, check the category where your competitor sites are listed and submit your site there.
• Constantly check whether your site is listed in the directory. Free directories take a bit long to list a site

Conclusion

There is no doubt that search engines consider directories as reliable sources of reference. So, link popularity of the sites listed in directories increases manifold, making them to appear on top results. After all, our main objective in web site optimization is increasing our rank in search engines, and submitting in directories is one of those good practices that would ensure a better position in search engines.

Call Gatesix today and find out how our search engine submission services can help your site remain highly visible.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - An Introduction

You spent a good deal, worked hard for many days and nights and built a great website, but alas! it doesn't get enough visitors. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there and your website is totally lost in the shuffle, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. When search engines ignore your site, your site becomes non-existent in the cyber world. The real problem with your website is that it failed to harness the most cost-effective and powerful Internet marketing strategy: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site appear at the top of search engine results for your domain-specific keywords and phrases. The higher your website ranks in the results of Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., the greater the chance that your site will be visited by many, which in turn would skyrocket your sales.

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is about making your website visible on search engines. Its commercial purpose is to be the first to hit a customer base effectively. Why Search Engine Optimize

Everyday, millions of people search the web to find out what they look for. If your website doesn't come up top in the results, you lose your business to your competitors. SEO is important not only because it brings lots of visitors to your website, but also because it helps to increase the return on investment, if harnessed properly. Say for example, you have a website that sells mobile phones online. Optimizing the site for targeted keywords like 'low cost mobile phones' would bring it to the top results on popular search engines. This would in turn bring prospective customers to your site, which would result in higher sales.

However, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that requires patience, careful planning, and a long-term approach. Don't worry, here are 4 easy steps that will help you get started with optimizing your website.

4 Easy Steps to get started with Search Engine Optimization

a) Create traffic targeted content
Identify the keywords, i.e., words or phrases using which your potential customers will search the web. Example, if you are a hair salon, they will probably search using the keywords "hair cut", "hairstyle", etc. After identifying and gathering a set of keywords, categorize them under various themes and write web contents on those themes. That is, under the "hairstyle" theme, you can put keywords such as hairstyles, crew cut, long cut, short cut, curly cut, layered cut, etc. Using a Keyword Suggestion tool, you can see how many people search for a certain keyword. Any keyword for which the number of listings is less and the number of searches is more gives you a better chance of ranking higher than keywords for which the listings are more and the searches are less. Once you got the right keyword, use it appropriately in the page so that the page appeals to both the visitors and the Search Engines.

HTML tags such as title tags and meta tags also play a role in ranking top on search engines. These tags must contain only relevant keywords. Neither fill these tags with keywords that don't appear in the content nor leave them empty.

b) Make your pages Search Engine Ready
Check if your pages are search engine ready, i.e., are they crawlable by search engine spiders, is there something in them that will make the Search Engine neglect the page or give it a lower ranking.

To make your pages search engine ready

• Your website content must be readable. For the sake of appearing top on the search engines, do not make the content clumsy by repeatedly using the keywords. These kinds of clumsy sites may get top rank, but won't get readers.
• Add only relevant keywords: Do not stuff the website content, title tag, and meta tags with too many keywords. The keywords that are provided in the title and meta tags must appear in the website content.
• Do not add invisible text: Most of the search engines find them out and ban those sites.

c)Submit your site to Search Engines.
Now that you have made your site search engine ready, start submitting it to the popular search engines. That way, they know your site exists. Some search engines may require periodical submission. If you find the submission process tough, get a Site Submission tool available on the web. (More on Submitting to Search Engines)

d)Track your performance
Often times, people complain that their position in search engines has gone down. We must not forget that Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process for reasons like, Search Engines changing their algorithm frequently, new sites coming up for the same keywords as yours, your watch sites (competitor sites) optimizing themselves for search engines and so on. Thus, it is important you keep track of where you rank for each of your keywords in the most important search engines and constantly modify the content so that search engines know that your page is active. This enhances your rank on the search results.

Conclusion
Although Search Engine Optimization seems to be so complicated at the outset, it really is a simple and interesting process that you will enjoy doing yourself. Search Engine Optimization is the most cost-effective, easy to implement Internet marketing strategy that can get you more traffic and in effect more revenue. So go ahead, start optimizing your site. Happy Search Engine Optimizing...

9 Simple Steps toward a Search Engine Optimized Website

Search Engine Optimization - An Introduction

Search Engine Optimization is probably the cheapest and most cost effective form of Internet marketing. In fact some studies indicate Search Engine Optimization as being the second most effective marketing strategy. The increasing popularity of Search Engines and the fact that good quality and cost effective traffic can be brought through them to websites has led to the development of a whole industry that revolves around how to make Web pages/Websites more search engine friendly or in other words better optimized. The result of this advent of Search Engine Optimization industry is the feeling among webmasters and novices in the industry that SEO is like rocket science and has to be handled by professionals only. Thankfully, the truth is that anyone can search engine optimize Websites. All it takes to optimize a Web site and get better ranking and traffic are 9 simple steps.

The 9 Simple Steps

1. Select Right Keywords

This is THE most important step and can easily be the reason for your ranking ahead or ranking below your watch sites (competition). Identify the words or phrases using which people search(might search) for your Web page on the Internet. If you sell dog food, your keywords must have something to do with "dog food". Do not use irrelevant keywords, even if they get you more traffic. If you are not sure of the keywords to be used, use any of the following tools to find good target phrases:

• Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity of target phrases.
• Googleis great for brainstorming target phrases.
• Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and compare how the competitors use the target phrase.

2. Analyze Competition

Determine who your competitors are. It is quite simple; search for the keyword on popular search engines. The sites that show up above your page are your competitors. Analyze those sites and find out how effectively they have used the targeted keywords. Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes, it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase.

Check out yours and your competitor's link popularity. In many engines, you can type: link:http://domain-name and get a link count for that particular site. The more the link count, the better.

3. Page Creation and Optimization

After identifying the keywords, create Web pages by targeting one word or phrase for each page. One common mistake most novice SEO's do is dump many keywords into a page. Not only does it make it difficult for you to rank high for each of those keywords, but also it makes the page less readable.

i) Make sure your keywords are present in the following places:

• Title tag
• META tags: Description tag and Keywords tag
• Body text: Heading tags, comment tags,alt tags and prominent places on the page content

ii) Conduct HTML validation for your Web pages. HTML validation helps you find out the errors in HTML code, which may prevent search engines from indexing your site.

iii)Then check and ensure that your pages are Spam-free. When your page elements, such as Title tag, META tag, and body text, are stuffed with repeated keywords, search engines may consider them Spam and ban your site.

4. Visual Review of Page

• Check whether your site has usable navigation.
• Ensure you have informative and readable content. Good content will ensure that your page appeals to human visitors as well as spiders.

A badly written page may get a good ranking on search engines, but visitors will move away from your site with the same speed they came in. Although Search engine spiders that grade your site will not look for visual appeal, directory editors and human visitors will!.

5.Link Building

Get inbound links from quality sites. Quality sites are those that rank high on search engines and/or have a good Google PageRank. If the sites are in someway connected with the theme of your webpage that will help increase your rank better. DO NOT turn to link farms for link building this can get your site banned in search engines.

6. Submitting to Search Engines

If you have followed steps one to five you are ready to submit your webpages to the search engines. Chances are the search engines found your webpages through the links that you built but if they some how missed your webpages don't worry you can always let them know that your pages exist through Search Engine Submission.

You can refer the below link for details on submission to search engines

Altavista

http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl

All The Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

MSN
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

7. Submitting to Directories

Search Engines consider Web Directories as expert documents. A presence in popular directories can help you get a better ranking on search engines. You can submit your site to popular directories, such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, and Microsoft bCentral. For more information on Web Directories and guidelines for submission.

8. Maintain

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process. Popular Search Engines keep making changes to their algorithms i.e the way they rank webpages quite often. Thus it is imperative that you continually optimize your pages based on the current algorithms to achieve high ranks.
It's important to measure your rankings atleast monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank and then re-submit or wait for the search engine to revisit the page.

9. Tracking

Ultimately, it is not top rankings you are really after, but more traffic and sales. High traffic is not something that automatically follows top rankings. It is something you get by ranking high for "good keywords". Thus it is important that you track your website usage using a good log file analysis program and find out which keywords and which keywords bring in most visitors to your pages. Use this information to optimize your pages better for these terms and search engines.

Conclusion

At first glance, search engine optimization may look like magic; but actually all it takes is 9 simple steps. Search Engine Optimization is a simple continuous process that helps search engine do their job more efficiently. It does take a lot of time and patience but stay the course search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble.

If you follow all the above-listed steps, you will definitely see an improvement in the search engine rankings for your keywords. The best part is that you do not have to spend any money on the expensive search engine optimizers!

An Introduction to Title Tag Optimization

Title tags are the words that appear at the very top of your web browser, and they tell the search engine what the page is about. For example, see the top band of this browser. You will see "Title Tag Optimization - Search Engine Optimization Tips ". This is the title of this page.

Before discussing how to optimize the Title tag, lets see how exactly it looks in your website's HTML code.

< Title of Your Web page Here< /title >
< name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of the page">
< name="keywords" content="keyword phrases that describe your web page">
< /head >
< meta content="Brief description of the contents of the page" name="description" >
< meta content="keyword phrases that describe your web page" name="keywords" >
Title Tags - The Myth
"The Title tag doesn't really do much".

Is that a myth or the truth? Let's see! Title tags function much like the title of a book. Say for example, you need a book on "Search Engine Optimization". You walk into a library, search all the titles, see a book titled "Search Engine Optimization Tips", and take that book. Interestingly, there were some other books in the library, which had more information on Search Engine Optimization than the book you took. But, their title didn't convey that. Search engines also do the same thing: they look at the title of a web page and decide what it is about. There is no doubt among the SEOs regarding the importance of Title tags in Search Engine Optimization. One of the steps to increase a website's rank is optimizing the Title tags.

How to Optimize Title Tag?

Of all the tags, Title tag is definitely the most important when used correctly. When calculating your web page's relevance to a search, most search engines consider the content of the title tag as one of the parameters and display that content in search engine results pages (SERP). Title tag therefore needs to be carefully constructed in such a way that it increases your website's position in the SERP, and it is attractive enough to encourage a surfer to click on your link.

Similar to writing your site content; write your Title tag for your audience first and the search engines second

• Have your keywords in the Title tag: Including the keywords in the Title tag increases the relevance of your web page, when someone searches the web with that keyword.
• Keep the Title tag short and readable: Search engines don't prefer long Title tags. In fact, Google prefers short Title tags. Because some search engines display Title tags in the search engine result pages, make them informative.
• Use different Title tags for different web pages in your site: Never give the same Title tag for all the web pages. The Title tag of a web page must be relevant for that page.
• Don't include your company name in the Title tag unless you think it will attract more users. Instead of your company name, you can consider a suitable keyword.
• Never keep the Title tag empty and never use irrelevant words in the Title tag.

Pay attention to writing your title tag. Don't ignore them, they are a powerful tool and must be used to their fullest advantage. The Title tag helps the search engines decide the theme of the web page being crawled for indexing. When a search for keywords is conducted, the Title tag is given heavy consideration by all search engine algorithms. Also remember, each page in your website is unique and needs a different Title tag. Place the most important keyword phrase for that specific page in the Title tag, and the page will get a certain boost in the search engines. Yahoo and MSN Search are especially influenced by keyword-rich Title tags. Look after your Title tags and they will look after your site traffic.

Optimizing for MSN

The Advent of MSN as a Search Engine

Microsoft had been napping for a long time and ignored the advancements in the field of Search Engine and Content Targeted Advertising. Although now dependent on Yahoo's Intokmi for their search results, Microsoft has made it very clear that they will compete with Yahoo and Google for their share in the Search Engine market. Given Microsoft's aggressive nature in fighting competition, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate them.

The recently re-launched MSN Search and future MSN Search integration with upcoming versions of Windows is about to make MSN one of the biggest and most important players in the world of searching. Thus, it is imperative to get good ranking in MSN if you want the share of traffic they can give to your Web page. Although MSN search spider does a fairly good job in crawling Web pages, you may benefit by submitting your website at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx .

Optimizing for MSN Search

With Microsoft sharing Yahoo's Inktomi search index to provide their search results, optimizing for yahoo meant optimizing for MSN. But things are changing at a rapid phase and with Microsoft getting active on the patent front, it is evident that they are working on their own search algorithm.

Luckily for us, the rules of Web page optimization that thought to be followed to please the MSN search algorithm aren't very different when compared to those already followed for other search Engines.

What They Lay Emphasis On?

As with most other Search Engines, MSN Search places heavy emphasis on content. They even allow higher keyword density than Google does. For MSN Search, it is best to keep your pages at least 200 words long and have phrases which searchers commonly use. Other than that, they lay importance in the following in the order they are listed.

• As MSN team declares in their blog that, they attach a lot of importance to the number and quality of sites that link to your pages.

• Clean coding is necessary with MSN Search. They even go to the extent of asking Webmasters to ensure that their pages are HTML validated. MSN's spider has a strong preference for well-written code. If a Website's coding is poorly written, it appears that MSN Search downgrades the site's search rankings heavily.

• A well-designed site map with good link text will help the MSN spider to crawl the site and ensure that all pages are indexed.

• Title tag should be less than 80 characters long and should be attractive enough to make a searcher click on the link.

• MSN Search doesn't rank based on Meta Keywords and Description, but it seems to place some importance on meta tags. So adding appropriate meta tags for each page might be beneficial as well.

• MSN Search recommends that an HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB. Therefore, ensure that you limit the size of your Web pages to a reasonable limit.

What MSN Doesn't Like?

MSN search lists the following as being search engine unfriendly due to the difficulty search engine robots have with this type of content:
• Frames
• Flash
• JavaScript navigation
• HTML Image Maps
• Dynamic URL's

Techniques not liked by MSN Search

MSN thinks the following to be unscrupulous SEO practices:
• Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to increase a page's keyword density, this includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view.
• Using hidden text or links. You should use only text and links that are visible to users.
• Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page, such as link farms.

As you can see, these "rules" are no different from those mentioned by the rest of the industry. So avoid the above-mentioned techniques and the chances of your getting banned by any search engine are remote. On a related note, this is what MSN search's Program Manager, Eytan Seidman, has to say about spamming MSN.

"You crawled my site, so why can't I find it in your search index? This is one is a little bit easier. The reason that this is most likely happening is that we are detecting the page as spam when we analyze the page to build our index. How can you make sure that this does not happen? The best thing to do is to not spam us. On our site owners help, we talk about some of the things that we consider spam. In case you have not read it, here is a quick refresher: dirty javascript redirects, stuffing alt text, white on white links, off topic links etc. We take this stuff very seriously and we are continuously working to improve our spam detection."

Conclusion

With the increasing popularity of MSN Search and with Microsoft planning to make the search a part of their next windows release, your efforts to optimize your site for MSN are sure to pay off. For more details on optimization for MSN Search, read their help document and blog.

Hotel Internert Marketing by Gatesix

Optimization for Yahoo

Why Optimize for Yahoo?

According to a recent study, of all the searches done through search engines, around 25% of searches are done through Yahoo. That means, if your site is not coming up on Yahoo, you lose 25 percent of your potential visitors. Until February 2004, Yahoo used Google results. So, optimizing for Google was enough to get a top rank on Yahoo. As of 17th February 2004, Yahoo dropped Google results and instead showed search results using Inktomi algorithm. Yahoo's shift from Google to Inktomi made optimizing for Yahoo inevitable.

The New Yahoo Search Engine

Although Inktomi / Yahoo search algorithm doesn't differ too much from that of Google's, it is not exactly a clone of Google's algorithm. Based on the search results on Yahoo, it seems Yahoo's new algorithm gives much importance to keyword density in body text, Title tag, and META tags and to inbound links. Therefore, concentrating on these two items will definitely increase your site's ranking on Yahoo.

Keyword Density

The new Yahoo search engine gives more importance to keyword density. A Website with high keyword density may fare well in Yahoo. The average keyword counts that seem to work are as follows:

• Title Tag - 15% to 20%: Yahoo displays the title tag content in its result page. Therefore, write the title as a readable sentence. A catchy title will attract the reader to come to your Website.
• Body Text - 3%: Boldfacing the keywords sometimes boosts the page's ranking. But, be careful not to be awkward to the readers. Too much of boldfaced content irritates readers.
• META Tags - 3%: In META description and Keyword tags, provide important keywords at the beginning. Do not use the keywords repeatedly in the Keyword tag, because Yahoo may consider it Spamming. Write the description tag as a readable sentence.

Inbound Links/Back Links

Yahoo considers inbound links highly important. Inbound links are the links from other sites pointing to your site. Having considerable links, with appropriate link texts, from quality sites increases your site's ranking in Yahoo.

Static Pages versus Dynamic Pages

Like most other search engines Yahoo prefers static pages to dynamic pages. Sometimes, Yahoo may fail to index dynamic pages. Therefore, consider the following tips to ensure that Yahoo indexes all your web pages:

• Have static pages with keyword-rich content; it increases the rank of your site on Yahoo
• If you have some important dynamic pages, prepare a site map or quick links section with links to all the Web pages. This would help the Yahoo spider to craw all your pages.

Frames

Most of the search engines, Yahoo in particular, hate frames. Avoid using frames on your site, because Yahoo spider finds it difficult to crawl them.

The sure-shot solution to rank high on yahoo is simply getting plenty of back links from quality sites, and then having copious keywords in the body text, title, META, and alt tags. As Yahoo holds the 25% share of the Internet searches, it is prudent to have your Web pages optimized for Yahoo. When your Web page ranks high on Yahoo, you get additional traffic that will convert into increased sales.

Vincent S Brown - 1st September 2005

Internet Marketing by Gatesix

Podcasting and SEO

Podcasting and SEO: How to SEO your podcasts

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."

For marketers, more of your focus needs to be on the development and findability side, not gadget seduction. "Nobody is going to listen to the podcast no matter how elegant it may seem," Watlington concluded. "Focus on findability, focus on quality content and engaging the user. Focus on something people will want to listen to."