Will Podcasts Ever Require SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

The power of the internet is growing stronger everyday and with it is the growth in software that makes using the internet even easier. Marissa Mayer on her Google blog has an interesting post on the ‘Future of search’ and it had me pondering a few things related to search engine optimization.

Marissa mentions that search queries using voice will be one direction that search engines will need to address into the future, particularly in association with mobile search. If the power of voice recognition software improves over the next few years, it will be interesting to see if any of the search engines start listening to videos and podcasts. Not just listening but also interpreting and indexing based on what the search engine has ‘heard’. Will we then need to ensure that every podcast has its contents passed past the SEO expert before recording?

I don’t think it around the corner yet but into the future? Who knows. The other issue is whether or not podcasts have had their day and we have now moved on. Video is big and MP4 players can now playback videos. I don’t think our SEO skills will be tested just yet, if at all.

We don’t know where search will take us in the future. Our role in the big picture is to try and determine where search is going so we can have sites optimized for those changes. It is an evolving process and those that were involved in SEO many years ago can attest to the number of times websites have had to be tweaked because of changes made by the search engines.

Voice recognition and podcasts. The technology is not far away. In fact, for many podcasts, the technology is already here. Will search engines use it? We don’t know until they tell us, or we notice something strange going on. Until then, podcasts are safe. Video on the other hand, will be the next target. They need to be accurate to the associated keywords and optimized using relevant SEO strategies designed for video.