Monday, October 29, 2012

PODCAST Marketing: The Basic SEO Essential Steps



Why Podcast SEO?

How we all wish that every page and content of ours makes it to #1 spot on Google's search results. Not an impossible task, but it requires continuous efforts from web marketers, we call  them – SEOGurus or SEOptimizers. Coming to podcasts, I have written a few basic steps that should help you to optimize the Podcast so that it can rank higher on search results. The reasons for writing this article is not many webmasters are aware of these basic steps. We still see SE (Search engine) crawlers struggling to analyze the contents of audio/video directly from source. As a result webmasters have to rely on other optimization methods which can guide the Search crawlers to the content. These are H1-H3 Tags, Page Titles, Meta descriptions and an audio description on the page.

Podcast SEO Steps: (These are the Tips that I follow without FAIL!)

Title name: I always choose a Title name that is relevant to the Podcast and contains a relevant keyword. Avoid stuffing the title with too many keywords.

MP3 Properties: Add the ID2v2 and ID3v3 info tags to the mp3 file. A simple and direct way to do this is by right clicking the mp3 file, click 'Properties' and select 'Details' tab. Here you can Enter the Tile, Subtitle and insert any comments. We suggest that you utilize all these 3 fields. Few more fields are shown in the Image.

Mp3 Tag Info (Image1)
Mp3 Tag Info (Image2)
( Right Click on Mp3 file > Click 'Properties'> Select 'Details' tab)
   
Social Media: Share the links to the podcast page  on Twitter and Facebook page. Bookmarking the URL's also leads to some visibility though the effort must be restricted to a few bookmarking sites. We suggest a maximum of 5 bookmarking sites as it is more than enough.

Newsletters:  Let the users know about your Podcasts. Include a snippet of podcast text in quotes in your newsletters. Newsletters can also be used to remind the users of earlier podcasts that you might want them to revisit.   This strategy has helped us in gaining some traffic towards our existing and previous set of podcast releases.The basic purpose of a snippet or a quote is to show the customers the window towards the contents of your podcasts. Once they get a taste of what the audio has to offer, chances are they will end up going through the whole Podcast without bouncing off during the middle of the discussion..and that’s a thing you will love. 

Transcription: Search engines like crawlable content. It’s a good idea to transcribe the podcast and place the transcript on the page containing the podcast itself. One advantage of this is it adds to the content of the page and its more search engine friendly. 

Sample Transcript

Directories: Submit the podcast to few podcast directories. A few popular ones are Podcastalley, DigitalPodcast, BlogtalkRadio, iTunes, Podcastdirectory.com, BluBrry, Stitcher and Doubletwist.

A Few Things to Avoid!

#1 Avoid recording overly long records:  A user ideally will spend around 7-10 minutes for a podcast before moving on. If the content of discussion is very interesting, then there no bounds to following a time limit.
#2 Don’t forget your past recordings. Keep visiting them and passing them onto your customers. However, you must note that not all Podcasts are made equal. Hence a good strategy will be to single out those recording done in the past few months .. let’s say 3-4 months which gained some popularity. Retweeting them and bringing them in front of your customer base will be a good idea for fresh users. I always make sure that the recordings done in the past are repeated and brought forward either through Social Media or weekly newsletters.

Summary: I hope to have to covered the basic steps of marketing a podcast in a simple yet powerful manner. There could be many strategies that people might be following which are not listed here. But we would love to hear it from you.  You can contact us at joshua(at the rate)alltranscript(dot)com

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