An Ad-Hoc Session on SEO for Podcasting, Vodcasting & Social Media
Speakers Li Evans and Whitney Hoffman never showed up for this session, but it turned into a valuable on-the-fly group discussion on what people in the room were doing for their own SEO. These were the tips I gathered from the audience:
Tip #1: Give each podcast its own page. On that page, provide a transcript or partial transcript that includes keywords.
Tip #2: Keep tags relevant. You can get blacklisted by Google for using too many, or for using unrelated keywords.
Tip #3: Use the free tool on Wordtracker.com to look for relevant keywords if you don’t think you will be found on your target keyword.
Tip #4: Include your keywords in the title of your post, podcast page, or podcast name.
Tip #5: Don’t try to get cute with the name of your blog or podcast. One of the audience members talked about how he named his blog “Help iGot a Mac” and when people searched for “Help I Got A Mac” he wasn’t being found.
Tip #6: Google now recognizes underscores in URL strings, but they still see them as a connector of words, not a gap between them. Use dashes instead if you want Google to see each word individually.
Tip #7: Get immediate rankings in Google by going on the social networks. “The only thing that Google hasn’t changed over time is how greatly links affect your website”, a wise attendee noted. Make social network accounts and link to yourself from these sites to create inbound links from highly ranked sites.
Tip #8: Go to Alexa.com to see the top rated sites. Focus your social profile building efforts on the sites that have lots of traffic to ensure that the links to place back to your site are seen as valuable by Google.
Tip #9: Keyword optimize the names of your social network profiles.
Tip #10: Every time someone posts a comment on a social network such as MySpace or Facebook, Google generates a new inbound link. This is why it’s important to maintain your community, not just put it up and leave it alone.
Tip #11: People in the audience recommended “Facebook Fan Pages” and LinkedIn Groups for an older target audience that isn’t in the “tween” Myspace phase.
Tip #12: If you’re on WordPress, upgrade to 2.5 to enable tagging.
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