Podcasting may be an audio form of marketing that Google cannot index yet, but you can still get your episodes to rank highly on Google. To do this you need to do a podcast SEO. It’s a process to optimize the page and other contents for the search engine giants to easily find your content and direct potential customers to your podcast.

Choose A Keyword For Each Episode

Your first action to improve your podcast SEO should be to choose a short keyword for each podcast episode. While keywords are losing prominence on search engines, they are needed to help with search queries and to tell search engines what the article is about. A keyword should be as short as possible so it can be used in various search criteria.

Create A Page / Blog Post For Each Episode

On your website, you want to produce a new page for each episode you create. The pages will advertise your podcasts and be a springboard for listeners to find your podcast on iTunes or download them directly from your site.

The page’s URL needs to have the keyword inserted as the extension. For example, if your keyword was “creating a podcast” you would want your URL to be: “yourcompany.com/creating-a-podcast”. You must use hyphens instead of underscores to separate words, as search engines use hyphens to identify spaces between words and not underscores.

Create The Content On The Page / Blog Post

The next stage in improving your podcast SEO should be to create a blog post that is at least 300 words but ideally 500 words long. The blog post has to be related to the podcast content so one of the best options is to give a summary of the episode, without giving away the story.

Your chosen keyword should be mentioned within the content enough times that it has a density of at least 1.5% but no more than 3%.

Use Heading Text

Ensure that your content uses at least one or two H2 heading tags that have the keyword inserted on them. While this is a very small requirement for the podcast SEO, it does help.

Insert An Image

Next, you need to insert an image to your page/blog. Google and other search engines love images and they are really easy to optimize for search engines. To optimize them, use the keyword within the title, caption and alternate text. These are the three main areas Google will analyze on your page.

Speed Up Your Website

One of the biggest new additions to search engine optimization is the speed of a website. This is because Google cares just as much about a user’s experience as it does about the content. Therefore, slow sites are having their ranks lowered.

Increase the speed by reducing the file size of images and using Content Delivery Networks. Another option for speeding up your website is to move to a better server such as a virtual private server.

Meta Description

Every page on your website should have a strong meta description. You don’t have many characters for this but you need to include your keyword at least once and best practices state you should make the meta description read well. A good meta description will attract audiences to your website and help build good links on search engines.

Get Social

Social media is essential in this day and age. Google, Bing and others all use Facebook likes, retweets and other content to determine the relevance and quality of the content. By having highly active social accounts you will help raise the profile of your content on search engines (as well as social channels).

Share Your Content On Directories

There are numerous directories online like BizSugar that you can promote your new page/blog post on. This helps to create a backlink to your content that will help you achieve a higher page rank. This is also a good way to create backlinks from users across the internet who read/listen to your material and like to share it.

Create Other Links

Google and other search engines do consider how your articles are linked. Therefore, link to relevant pages in your content. Google will see the relevance and start to rank your content higher.

Conclusion

SEO is an important marketing tool to grow awareness of your brand. Through good use of the content, images, website speed and networking – you can improve your podcast’s page rank and be found online.