Understanding how search engines operate is important when you have digital real estate out there for the world to see. Now that we have covered the types of websites you can use for your podcast show, it’s time to understand how search engines work.
Search engines crawl or “index” all the websites and media files on the World Wide Web — documents, podcasts, graphics, jpegs files, .mov videos, movies, news articles, internet radio programs, web pages and so on. It’s an insurmountable amount of things to catalog. Search engines are constantly working in the background to create an accurate image of the internet. Many search engines crawl the same web pages multiple times to maintain an up-to-date database of files and web pages. With the most relevant information available, they can provide answers to your search queries by going through all pages and rankings they’ve crawled.
Proper Searching
Knowing what exactly to search for is important when you’re searching for a specific answer. The same applies for when the general public searches for you or a podcast similar to yours. For example, typing in the following two queries will give you different results:
- “best podcasts to listen to on business”
- “best podcasts to listen to on business + California”
By putting specific words in quotation marks, you’re asking the search engines to additionally target those parameters. The more detailed your search query is, the more detailed your results will be — plain and simple. This is the basic reason that SEO (search engine optimization) should be an extremely important part in your marketing. It seems to be a popularity contest, if you will, where search engines believe the more popular the page, the more valuable the content. Of course, these pages are not found manually.
Instead, Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines employ mathematical equations (also known as algorithms) to sort the relevant results, and then rank the relevancy in order of popularity. There are hundreds of variables that make up these algorithms. And to throw another wrench into the works, Google constantly changes their algorithms.
Google recommends providing relevant content on your website to keep the interest of all visitors who put their eyes on your website. Every page should have a reachable outbound link. Be courteous and give shoutouts to other podcasters you listen to or idolize. Connect your audience to those who are connected to you. Your audience will grow when you give them more value than most other podcasters out there.
You want to create a useful, informative site that has a lot of valuable content. When it comes to imagery, always make sure the title and ALT-text attributes are very descriptive. (If you’re not sure exactly what those are, feel free to reach out to the marketing team!) The more descriptive they are, the more easily Google, Yahoo and other engines will find your content. Bing recommends having a keyword rich URL structure in place.
Proper Maintenance
It’s important for your organic rankings and SEO for you to maintain your podcast website on a regular basis. Something that’s often overlooked is the imagery on your website. Make sure everything in your website’s file system (also known as the media library) is accurately titled, captioned and being used. If you switch out images, be sure to delete the old images that are no longer being used. It will ensure your directory listings are healthy.
Cleaning up your website in this fashion means you won’t have as many errors when you run your Moz report for your ranking. Keep keyword-rich content on your pages and match your keywords. Regularly add fresh content to your website and don’t let pages or content go stale!
Thank you for your attention!
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