Podcasts Are Not Easily Read, But Easy To Optimize

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 28 of August , 2007 at 10:08 am

(Source) To start, you need something to record the audio. If you own a Mac, GarageBand is included, and is a great program. Since I own a desktop for podcast, I use Audacity.

Podcasting is picking up speed. It’s easy to see why. Anyone, literally, can do it. If you have the right equipment you can be set up to do podcasting in just a few minutes. All you need to do is record your podcast and upload it to your website then send it out to a few podcast directories for marketing purposes. If you don’t drive traffic to hear the podcast then it doesn’t matter how much time and energy you put into it, no one will hear it.

Of course, you can go back to the backs, and you should. SEO delivers more traffic to more websites daily than any other form of online marketing. But how do you SEO a podcast?

Search Engines Still Learning To Read Podcast Files

This is the question to answer. The search engines, as of now, can’t read audio, video, or image files. Therefore, these files won’t get crawled. That’s been a problem historically. Some day I believe we’ll see search engines that can crawl these files, but for now, we have what we have.

The only way to ensure that search engines crawl your image files is to add alt text to the files. More and more people are starting to figure that out now and are including alt tags with their img src codes. Can you do something similar with podcast files? Yes, you can add an alt tag to your podcast files, but honestly we haven’t figured out yet just how the search engines rank photos and audio/video files.

If you conduct a search for images using a keyword that is important to you then you’ll get a list of photos and images related to that keyword, but the order seems rather random. So too do the results for audio and video queries. What gives?

How To Optimize Podcasts And Other Multimedia

I believe the best way to optimize your podcast files is to give your podcast a keyword-rich name that you want the search engines to key in on. For instance, if you are an auto mechanic and your podcast is a 10-minute free instruction podcast on how to give a car a tune up then you might name your podcast “auto tune up instruction.” Very basic and very important. Whenever someone searches for that specific keyword phrase at any of the search engines, you’ll increase your chances of being found, especially if they add the keyword “podcast.” With Google Universal and Ask 3D making vertical searches more easy, this type of optimization will become more important in the future.

One thing is clear, the Internet is becoming more technological in the sense that demand is rising for multimedia presentations - video, audio, slideshows, and a mixture of media presentations. It is important that you poise yourself now for the advances in optimization for these media so that when the search engines roll out their beta versions of spider technologies designed to rank your podcasting, video, and multimedia files, you’ll be one of the first to hit the ground running.

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

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