If you’re keeping up on different real estate marketing strategies, you’ve surely heard of podcasting. I won’t discuss all the benefits, at least not for this post, of how real estate podcasting can strengthen your market presence or improve relationships with customers. Rather, I’d like to hit the debated topic of optimizing podcasts for search engines and show you how it can be done.
Like I mentioned in Free Real Estate SEO, search engine optimization is hard work. Doing so for podcasts is even harder. If you’re willing to put in some elbow grease, read on.
Podcast SEO
Most search engines can’t extract information from podcasts. After all, it’s just an audio file. So here are a few SEO tips to help your podcast move higher up for its topic.
- Use Good Metadata
- Write Transcripts
- Optimization on-page text
- Submit your podcast feed to podcast search engines (especially Podscope)
Good Podcast Metadata
For HTML documents, metadata is slowly going by the wayside. The information is frequently inaccurate and some search engines completely ignore it. However, for podcasting, metadata is still helpful.
Metadata (or ID3 tags) is extra information embedded in your podcast to let search engines and listeners know what it’s about. Whatever software you are using, look for a place to add ID3 tag info like:
- Title
- Genre
- Artist
- Album
- Description
These terms may not make a whole lot of sense when you’re doing real estate commentary, but they’re the standard fields used by the different systems and aggregators. These fields will frequently be indexed, so be sure you fill them in. Oh, and make sure they’re accurate too.
Tip: “Album” is good for categorizing your podcasts. You can use it to name your series on Buying a New Home or keep all financing podcasts grouped together.
Transcripting Your Podcasts
This one is huge. It’s time consuming, but extremely important to be sure that search engines get your content. Just type the whole podcast out and you’ll be good to go. If you really don’t want to spend the time, there are many transcription services that you can hire, too.
Optimal Podcast Environment
I don’t think this header really says what I want, but it was a choice between “optimal podcast environment” and “Hug your podcast with optimized text.” Anyway, the idea is to be sure that the link to your podcast is surrounded by a keyword rich summary of your podcast’s topic. Search engines will see these extra on-page factors and appropriately deduce the topic.
Podcast Search Engines
This is where people search for podcasts, so be sure you submit your feed to all the podcast directories out there. And don’t forget Podscope. You also want to ping services such as Weblogs Audio.
Get Podcasting
If you’ve read this far, I’d guess you already have a podcast or are very close to starting one. Again, this stuff isn’t really hard. It just takes a lot of work. If you have any questions on how to move forward with any of the things I mentioned, let me know. Also if you have other ideas on how to optimize your podcast, I’d love to hear it!
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