Podcast Metadata Mastery: Boost Your Visibility And Reach

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard and along with my co host, Tom Hazzard, we are gonna talk about a really detailed techy subject. But I think it is so important we call it unlocking the secret to your content. Right? Like, I mean, this is the problem that we have so much with. The wonderful, fabulous things that you say on your podcast don't always get unlocked to the point that they can make you found. Right. So that they're not searchable within the search engine that is Apple and Spotify and the podcast apps out there. And many of you are not producing blogs that correspond with your podcast episodes. And when you don't do that, you have no other digital footprint for that episode for you to be found as well. We find this goes like, all the way up. I'm going to say, like, the bigger celebrity shows, the less actual digital unlocking they have. And I find that really interesting, don't you, Tom? Like, this is just, to me, a shocker.

Yes, it's fascinating to me. And what's disheartening, and I don't want to, I guess, discourage any of you podcasters or content creators from creating your content, because that's the first and most important thing you should do. I'm glad you're doing it any which way that you're doing it. Having said that, we all want to be heard and found by more of our ideal listeners or our ideal audience followers, whatever you are trying to grow for your personal brand, your business brand, whatever it is that you're doing. And it's very disheartening that every day I meet with at least half a dozen podcasters, sometimes more, and I do these power podcast appraisals, which basically is a review of their show. And what are they doing? Well, what are they not? And I almost always, always find at least three things that are opportunity gaps, things they're leaving on the table, and most often it has to do with some of these technical details. That's why I'm passionate about it, because I want you all to be found. I want you all to be heard by more people. And it's not just about recording your stuff and publishing it. I wish it were that simple.

Right. Because we record it. But they don't come unless they can find you, right? Unless they can search for you and you're discoverable. Search and discovery. And that's what we're really gonna today about optimizing the podcast and the blog metadata, the technical parts of it. Think of it like that, metadata, plus a bunch of other things. Right. Little technical details. And how you put your podcast and how you put it into your listing, how you put your blog into the blog of your site in its listing. Right. How you do those things make a difference into whether or not you are going to be seen, heard and found and then listened to. And that makes a really big difference for so many of us who really want to preach to more than just our most favorite followers who know us, love us. Right. And will listen to anything we have to say, which is so amazing. And I'm grateful to those binge listeners, but we want new people to find us too. We don't want to be a hidden gem and a hidden expert in our field.

Yeah, this is where you don't want to be the best kept secret. You want to be amplifying your message and like Tracy said, you want to be discovered. I view all of these podcast power appraisals. I do these evaluations of shows through that lens of discoverability. Sometimes that goes against what some marketing or branding experts would consider best branding practices. I actually disagree with that. I mean, there's a place for your branding being the same everywhere. It's not always that way in podcasting, but that's another episode.

But I actually just gave that talk yesterday, so I want to tell this story, Tom, because one of the guests who's over in Zoom with us, Suzanne Mueller, who has the Take it From the Iron Woman podcast, she introduced me to this great group and the Podcast Idea Club, and I just love what they're doing over there at they are. Christy and Craig have just a fabulous program and Craig made this post over in the community and he said that the real problem with podcast discovery is finding details within a conversation. And that is because so much of what we say is in that conversation. So much of what's valuable. Think of what we're going to talk about today. These like weird technical things that are called like metadata and schema and like these things that we're going to throw around today, that there's technical stuff to learn or to hire out and get somebody to do for you, like totally up for that. But the reality is that these are a roadmap for someone to find you. It's a sign to the podcast search engine that you belong in the results that they're going to list up. When somebody searches for something that they are desperately looking for information on. And what a shame if you don't show up because you don't do these things. Right. You're leaving that beautiful advice that you have hidden. So that's what we're going to get across today.

Wonderful. Yes.

We're going to break this into two portions. We're going to talk about the podcast first because there's a little less to talk about there. And quite honestly, it's more limited, the ecosystem is more limited in what you can do there.

Tom and I always say that the podcast search engine, the search engine that is Apple and Spotify, it's like archaic. It's like Internet 1.0 search engine. It's not good.

They're not very smart. You know, you type in something and spell it wrong, it doesn't say, did you mean to type this? No, it just won't give you a result, you know, so there are some things that are not good about it. But this is a system that we have. We need to work as best as we can within the system we have for the podcast listening apps. YouTube's a little different, obviously. Google is a lot different. We're going to get to that when it comes to your blog part of this, and I know some of you podcasters might be new ones, are thinking, why are we talking about blogs? We're talking about a podcast, aren't we? Well, they're related and we're going to get there. Let's talk about podcasts first. Okay. Podcast metadata. Here's the thing. When you go and publish an episode, that episode has a title, it has a description, it has some links that you can add in there. The description field of your podcast is an HTML capable field, so you can have links in it, and that's important.

But keep in mind that not every podcast player actually displays them properly. If you're using, you know, the name without HTTPs, colon and whatever. Sometimes it doesn't work in some of the search engines, but it works in the most important ones and you might as well do it that way and keep it user friendly.

I agree. And some of those older apps are changing to then enable HTML. So I mean, obviously, because some of the biggest ones have it, you need to use HTML text in Your description, the metadata. In podcasting, there was an old school method. I'm going to mention it briefly. I'm not going to spend a ton of time on it really, because it's worth mentioning, but not much more than that. Your podcast MP3 file is the file that gets streamed to or downloaded to, or I guess uploaded to, downloaded to anyway, devices for listening. And 10 years ago and more, it was more important to make sure that MP3 file had specific metadata, specifically what's called an ID3 tag or tags and ID3 tags in general. And really that's just a way to embed your title and description data, maybe guessed Data within the MP3 file. The reality is none of the listening apps use it. Zero. None of them, to my knowledge. Now somebody out there who's maybe more technical than me might point out to me, no, Tom, there's this one up to use it. Okay, well, let me know. I'd be curious to know about that. But my understanding is none of them use it. The only time it would be used if someone downloads your MP3 file to their device separately, not in a listening app. If you allow people to do that, then that mp3 file itself can have that kind of tag data within it, which can have your cover art in it, your title, your description, info about the guest. But that's about it now. The reality is, modern listening apps don't use it. And your entire episode listing, your episode that's published, has a title, has a description, has episode artwork. It's all in the RSS feed for your podcast. And that is inherently metadata that all the apps pick up and use and display and figure into their search function. The real message here about podcast metadata is you want to make some smart decisions about the title of each of your episodes and about the description of each of your episodes. It's not to be overlooked. This is not trivial. I find people that have no episode descriptions. I find, you know, every day I'll find people that have just a quick one that says interview with Tom Hazard and that's it. I'm like, really? That's what you put for description or the title is also just very basic. These are opportunities for you to have more meaningful titles relevant to the topic that's discussed and meaningful descriptions that are going to have your episodes come up in search within the podcast apps.

I want to mention this because there's a tie in to the description and your blog descriptions, which think of them like a meta description. So it's like the kind of brief little summary that you might put into the very, very bottom. If you're using schema data or something on a blog, you might use this. And it's a short summary roadmap for Google. It's the same thing here. So your first 150 to 160 characters are the most important part of that description of everything you're going to do, especially because you may want to copy and paste them into these other areas when you go to do your blogs. And so they're very valuable. And it's also the part where in a lot of apps it's all you see before it says read more. So you want to make sure that your first 150 and 160 characters are the most important and packed with some really important things. I cannot tell you Tom sees them all the time with like nothing in them or just like a few words. But what I see all the time is repetition, wasted space. In today's episode, how many times do we see that? And I will tell you that if you are using one of those AI tools, 90% of them will put that will do that. And I can tell which one you're using based on how, what it says at the very beginning of it, I can tell you're using a stock prompt to get that summary. Don't do that. You're wasting space. This needs to be compelling, intriguing, not just to the bot, which we want for the search summary, but also to the humans who might be looking at that and going, oh, I definitely want to click that. Here are the three things that description needs to have that I really want you to remember. And this applies whether you're doing it in your podcast or you're going to do it in your blog. It is. You need to know who your audience is. So, like, make sure you're directing this. When I do an episode for the Binge factor, I am talking to podcasters who have already started a show. I am not talking to newbies. I am talking to people who have already started a show and are really trying to grow that. My focus is on making sure that podcast hosts know that this episode is for them. Then the second part of what I what we want to do is we want to make sure that we're putting it in deep context to what this episode is giving someone. So if I listen to this, what's the payout? And when we do that, we are going to get to the third most critical important thing is, and that's our keywords. And we should have some kind of long tail keywords in the description portion of it. Right. We might have a shorter one in our title, but our keywords, what we really are about, what somebody might type into that search engine and we want to show up for as its primary focus of what we're talking about, what value we bring and the audience related to that, all of those things. That's what should be in that very first 150 to 160 characters. What it should not be is a series of keywords. If you keyword cram it, you are going to alienate your audience and you're actually going to hurt yourself in the search engines in the long run. Because when you don't get clicked and you don't get listened to, they're just going to give up on you anyway.

So sidebar on keywords. You're right, Tracy. Plus, what you're saying, keywords doesn't mean when I talk to people about keyword phrases and they sometimes will provide a list of keywords, it's a whole bunch of single words that are separate single words meant to be viewed separately. You're never going to rank on a single word for anything. Okay. When we say keywords, it's a bit of a misnomer, actually, in the whole industry for podcasting and in blogs, keywords, what we mean are keyword phrases, combinations of words that makes sense together, like Tracy said, that are not just crammed together because you want to squeeze all these different words into one thing so you can catch any one of them. No, they need to be related and long tail, like. Also, Tracy said longer phrases actually will help you get found more than shorter phrases most of the time. And you can sort of be one of the few people that has something that comes up in search for longer tail phrases. So you want to make them longer.

Especially if you're talking about something really new and different in your industry. Your keyword may not be something that is like, you know, there's a lot of people out there who talk about doing keyword research and all of those other things. That doesn't always apply because it doesn't have a system in the podcast player apps. But what we're looking for here when we are tuning into a podcast is the latest, greatest information. So if it's something new, make sure that your keywords are reflecting that. When we thinking about these 150 character descriptions, think about it being engaging, accurate to what's being said or what the lesson is in there, because it is a first impression. It's the first impression that somebody's going to get about am I in the right place. What should I do with this? It's also the first impression and probably the only impression with the exception of the title, that the search engine, the bot is going to get. But it is telling people that they're in the right place. It's telling Google where you belong, and it is telling Apple and Spotify and all of the podcast apps where you belong and where you should be served up. Keep that in mind when you're doing a description there. I think of descriptions like a leading paragraph when I used to write articles. When you think about leading, what am I trying to do? I am trying to get you to read the whole thing. I'm trying to get you to click and listen to the whole thing. That's simply its purpose. It means that I'm not lying to you about what they're going to get, right? I'm being truthful about what it is. I'm being accurate about what it is. And I'm also making sure that, you know, if you are in a podcast expert, if you are a looking for podcast growth, you're in the right place. Right? Like, so that what they're seeking, they will find. That's what we want to have happening. So those are some of the most important things in the whole area here. A couple of things I want to mention, tom, based on id3 tags.id3 tags and hashtags are not the same thing. For those of you who think that that's what that is. It has to do with like technical, how you labeled things sometimes in images, we call them alt tags, if you've ever heard them. That's a little more similar to what an ID3 tag was. Like, it's kind of giving a. Like, if you put this, then the name of it is this. Right? And so the two things would go hand in hand. More like a category, if you want to. Like description.

Yeah. Alt tags. We're going to mention a little more in relation to blogs. But the reality of ID3 tags are really very limited. Whereas with images in a blog, they figure into Google Image search. So they're much, much more important.

Right. And here's the thing. Look, let's talk about images because you are have. We are big proponents of episode art, right? It's one of the things we've talked about on this on a past episode, not too long ago, about a month ago. Episode art is really critically important. We think it's one of the most underutilized things that you could do to get somebody to click through and listen to your Episode. However, the podcast ecosystem, the search engine is not searching on the titles or any of the metadata that is in that photo image at this time. Now maybe it will in the future. What I highly recommend though you do, because that image tends to be something that gets shared out maybe by your guest or by your social media team or by yourself on social, because a lot of times those same images are then embedded in your blog. Get into good image tagging practices on it when you create it for your podcast, then it's going to be more useful and have more power as a search engine optimized image everywhere that you might use it. We have just some simple things. Title and alt tag are the two most important things actually give your image a title in. So when you save an image, when you download it, there's a title field. Like even if you did it to your desktop now, sometimes when you upload into something, it wipes it away. And like if you upload an image sometimes into your blog, it will wipe away the alt tag in the description you have to retype it in. Sometimes it does that if you auto load it from some place like a Google Drive or some other place. Sometimes it will also autofill it. You just need to get into a practice of like repeating that again if. And so I always put it in my original image so that if anybody's redoing it somewhere, they have that information again. So your title, an alt tag is something like if I were typing into the search engine about this episode, it would be podcast metadata for search and discovery. That might be my alt tag. I also might include feature brand. Tom Hazard. Tracy Hazard. And so usually I'll do a pipe and I'll do those things because I want the alt tag to include if somebody searched for any of those things, they would get they search for feed your brand in the Google search engine. They would get our images. I want those things. So you should maybe put your show name and your host name and then whatever the episode. I don't usually do the full name. I usually do like the short name, the keyword name, because nobody's going to type in the full name of it and expect to get it. It's just not going to happen.

So important, Tracy. I mean, obviously we're big proponents of unique images for each podcast episode, because when episodes come up in the search result, very often if you don't use images, every image looks the same. It's just the COVID art of your show over and over and over. And there's nothing to stand out and draw anyone's attention to one episode over another. It's also very important in the blog, which is what you're talking about with alt tags now. I think it's important, since we are drifting into blog territory, Tracy here to say just quickly why it is so important, why we very strongly recommend you have a blog post, an episode landing page for every podcast episode.

Now, a lot of you podcasters out there that don't even have a website, you just created your podcast, you put it out there on the listening apps. And again, I'm glad you've done that, that you're putting out your content in some way. However, I'm here to tell you, without a website and without an episode landing page for each, it's gonna be very hard for you to be found to be discovered by a much wider audience. Cause guess what, as wonderful as podcasting is, and I love it, it's my life, I've been doing it for a decade. Tracy 2 Podcasting and video casting are huge, but there are far fewer people searching in a podcast listening app to meet their needs. There are maybe more people than that searching in YouTube to meet their needs, but even that is far fewer people. I mean like a small single digit percentage compared to the volume of people searching to meet their needs through a Google search. And guess what? Google wants to serve up quality written content, I. E. Blogs, call them whatever you want, an article or writing, whatever, but they want to serve up written content, actually multimedia content with images and blogs and all these things mixed in embedded YouTube videos. You have a much wider net to cast for people to find your show through a blog than you do through any one podcast app or even all of them combined together.

And us podcasters have an advantage because Google wants to know that it was human generated content and our voice belongs with that. When we put out that content, when we associate that information with us, and there's an audio file attached to it and a video attached to it, and a human being attached to it, they treat it as higher value than any other written blog. And that is really one of the great reasons why you should consider having a blog in addition to it. But the one thing that I do want to say and add to what you're saying, Tom, about the blog side of things is it's really daunting to think about this. If you've already started your show and you've maybe got a hundred episodes in and like you're like, oh my gosh, I got to start adding blogs, don't be overwhelmed by this because you can add it at any time and it still has value. Now here's what Tom and I have seen from our client base on our platform over time. It's pretty consistent. The average we see about, I'm going to say 60 to 70% of your listenership comes from Apple on average. Most often Spotify somewhere under 10% for most people. There's a few very rare people with higher than that, but most of them are under 10%. But that is all eclipsed when we see that the most traffic is driven from outside of all the player apps and about on average across every show in every category that we've ever done. 60% of your listens are coming from Google or another search engine. So we see that very consistent number. The rest of those listens are competing for the 40% even though I said that they had such power, right? So they're 60 to 70% of the 40% or 60 to 80% depending on the player that you're using. But it's tremendous that your show can be found by outside so you are not reaching as many people without unlocking that written content information. And what we're saying here is while Tom and I believe in the full length blogs, even getting your minimum amount of metadata and minimum amount of description and tags out there is better than nothing. All you ever do is put up the image properly tagged, a decent description, properly written a title. You are going to do so much better than the next person because you've at least put that out into the search engine world that is Google.

But to just put one more perspective on this, I agree with everything you said Tracy. To put out that short what people often the old school term is show notes, summary blog post. Definitely do it if you're rather than having nothing and even if you're not going to do a longer form blog. But think about it, there's only so many words and phrases contained within that title and that 150 word description, right? There's only so many words contained there. So there's only so much that post can rank on. Maybe you rank on 3, 4, 6, 8 phrases in Google search. That would be a lot honestly for that short a blog. We obviously are fans of the long form magazine page style, what we call verbal SEO blog post that unlocks everything that was said within the episode or at least 90% of it usually. And I was actually surveying, I want to share this Tracy, because I want to share some more numbers. I was surveying some of our customers blogs even just written a year ago so not things that have been out there for six or seven years, although they are ranking on the first page of Google, a lot of those posts from six or seven years ago. And we've talked about that in some past episodes, but, you know, even just recent episodes, a year old was researching some for a customer that Rank on over 80 keyword phrases, a single post, 80 keyword phrases, a blog post for a podcast episode. And usually with the number of keyword phrases a page ranks on, we tend to see if a website is properly configured and in alignment with Google that that brings two to three times that number of unique visitors to the website over the course of a month. So you're talking about a lot of people that are going to organically find you. If you're a podcaster out there, you've been doing this for a while. You've been doing it for 25 episodes, 50 episodes, something like that, and you're seeing your numbers. I actually just met with someone today before recording this, that has about 20 episodes published their podcast, which I think should be a very popular topic a lot of people be interested in. It's only got about 250 downloads total, not per episode total in 20 plus episodes. And if you're wondering why you're not being found, there's probably a good reason why. And it's some of these things we're talking about that are not in alignment for people to find you.

Yeah, this is what I want. This is what I want to emphasize to all of you out there. A lot of you are getting feedback on your show that says you've got a great show. I love your show. This content was so valuable. Thank you so much. And your listens are not showing it. Your listens are not in alignment with the value you're providing. And what a shame if it's just this technical stuff that you need to master that you need to make sure and understand. So that's why we're bringing these things up. Not because we want this to, like, overwhelm you and complicate things, because we don't want it to hold you back. And once you master this, it's actually fairly easy. Like, this is some of the easy stuff. Tom and I use it in planning. Like when we're planning these episodes for you, when we're planning our content here for you, we're thinking about how we're going to make that really easily searchable.

We do make the title and we come up with an idea. All right, let's talk about this. We're like, all right, well, we can't call it that. We got to give it a really good searchable SEO title. We usually come up with two or three and then either morph it into one or choose the best one.

And if you're not good at it, use AI. Like, I can't tell you how many times I'll be like, I think this is the title. But, like, you know, give me an SEO optimized version of this. And then I'm like, oh, that's perfect. That's just what I needed. And then if sometimes it's not right, the next phrase on that I might add, is, okay, now make it really suitable for a podcast host to be attracted to. Click on this episode, right? So, like, I tie it to my target audience as my next wave of how I refine those titles, and you're going to get to where you need to be, and you're going to be a lot farther along when you ask those questions in that way and you retitle things and you re tag them and you rewrite your descriptions. When you do that, you're going to find that you're unlocking this. So again, podcasts and blogs are not so set in stone. Like, when you've put out a social media post, you can't go back and edit it a year later and have it be worth anything. You got to make a new post. But with the podcast episodes, you can fix it. Because your RSS feed is so flexible. When you've got blogs, you can add them later once you've put them in place. I don't recommend seriously editing them unless you find they're already valuable. But if you had a short blog version, absolutely go in and make it a long one. So, like, you're tapping into that data. Don't make a new one. Go ahead and revise the one you have. Go ahead and do that, because anytime after the fact, you're improving your searchability for that content you already created. You have not lost the value because you didn't do it to its full advantage at the beginning. You can always do it after the fact. That's not the case in social media. So take advantage of that in both your podcast feed and your blog feeds.

Okay? Now, before we wrap up this episode, Tracy, I think it's important to go through a few technical things a little more about the blog SEO. And here's the thing. Those of you that are bootstrapping it, go to podcastersunited.org find the blog post for this episode. Look at some of Our other ones go to school on us. Okay, use that now.

I think we did a recent episode about our whole, like, blog process. We did a recent episode on that. So we'll tag that in this episode's blog as well. So you can just jump right to it. And we also talk about how to refine AI descriptions and titles. We did an episode on that recently. We've got all the assistance that you need to actually duplicate what we do.

Yeah, I mean, when just looking at our blog, you're not going to see all the metadata configuration on the back end of everything because you can't see that publicly from the front. But you know, at least see the format and the quality of content that's there and the images and all that good stuff. But now you may not be able to afford the time to do it, even if you're bootstrapping it. And those of you that maybe are more in business and have some budget, this stuff can be done for you. And then obviously we're in the business of that. And so I don't know anybody else who does the blogs quite like we do. But let's talk about some of the details of the blogs. Okay, so the titles apply. What Tracy was saying about titles apply to the blogs. There's really nothing different about the one.

Thing I want to add to that, Tom, is that when you are putting it in your blog, there is something called a title tag. It's essentially the size of the title. It's called an H1 headline 1, H2 headline 2 H3 headline 3. Lots of people look at that and say, oh, I want it to be kind of this big. And so I'm going to pick an H4. I don't want it to be like gigantic. You can change the templated size that something is if you don't like the size of it. But if it is the title of your episode, it must be an H1. Do not deviate from that. You are not telling Google what the most important thing is about it. If you do not tag it, you're wasting your time. Tag it H1.

There can be multiple H1 tags, and often we find poorly SEO configured blogs that do have every different heading as an H1 tag. That is a huge mistake because you're confusing Google and Google does not know what the most important point of this page is. There should only be one H1 tag and there should be a hierarchy. There could be multiple H2s, H3s and such should be a hierarchy. And I'm not going to go into tremendous technical detail on this. But you just want to think about the hierarchy of all the main topic and then the sort of think of it as chapter headings or subject headings and different things you want to point at. That's fine. But you show you tell the story to Google about what this post, what this article, think of it that way, is about by assigning that hierarchy of hfegs.

Think about it as you're navigating Google through what's important in here and what you've covered, right? So you're helping it do that. So those are called tags, right? Title tags, heading tags, whatever you want to call them, whatever number you want to use. That's what they are. Make sure you use them. And meta description is the other big thing, which is the same thing. It's the short version because it is only 150 characters. Like it's the. It'll cut it off. It. It won't even allow it in the field for that. And sometimes in some of your blogs there will be actually a separate place where you can put that information so that Google knows what it is. Otherwise it's going to take that opening paragraph you have. And remember how I said so many of you say in today's episode, you're wasting your 150 characters because it'll take the first 150 of whatever's there if you don't provide it somewhere else. That's called a meta description.

While we're mentioning this about you reminded me something not just about the meta description, but about titles. I know we talked about it before, but this is important for podcasters. All too many of you put your episode number in the beginning of the title of your podcast. Okay, first of all, Apple frowns upon it, doesn't recommend it. But when you think about it from a search perspective and really how mediocre at best, the podcast listening app search engines are. If you put your episode number at the beginning of your title, guess what? You're using up some of those important characters at the beginning of your title. And if you go into any podcast listening app and you type ep 57 or episode 52, how many things are going to come up? Unfortunately, thousands. And it has nothing to do with what you're listening for or what you're wanting to listen to. It's irrelevant information. I know a lot of people want to have episodes with title numbers in them because they refer to them and say, oh, go back and watch episode 27 or listen to episode 35 when I talked about this, because it's easier for them to remember a number than a title. It's just a unfortunate practice and not recommended. It's really not going to help you if am I? So we recommend no episode numbers in the titles at all, whether it's in the podcast title or the blog title of your podcast episode. If you insist on having it, put it at the end in parentheses. Just don't put it up front because all these search engines are looking at titles from the beginning and so I.

Do want to Clarify it says 70 characters for titles that is mostly going to show you will like on YouTube and all the other places. Your first 70 characters are the most valuable space for a lot of the podcast apps. It's only 40 characters that show and so I'm saying characters, not words characters. And the same thing with your descriptions. Your descriptions are 150 to 160 characters depending on the different apps that you will be using whatever whatever. But Google's 150 characters. Just consider that your limitation on what will be shown and not cut off.

We might have said words earlier in the episode. Now that I think about, I'm pretty.

Sure I said characters. But okay, let's hope so. Yeah, clarifying that for you. So it's not a lot of space. So the last thing you want are these wasted filler words that have nothing to do with anything that you want to get across. Impact, power, emotion, get those things across in all of those areas. Tom, back to the blog's characteristics. There's something called schema markup and I want to mention it to people because it's really technical. It's more of that navigation for Google. And so there are tools, plugins that you can utilize that will actually help you with that schema. But think of it like the chapter headings model for YouTube for those of you who are YouTubers that those things can go into the schema markup as well. But these are again where you would putting H2H3 helping people navigate. Think about it, making Google an outline for your content.

Now one other thing that is important and relevant, that's the permalink also referred to as the slug of the blog post. Really it's the URL that after your whatever.com or.net or.org whatever you have that is important and it is recommended to have that match the title of the episode or very closely of the blog. Sorry. Or very closely match it. Now does it absolutely have to? No. I know there are lots of people that say hey, they want like we have a customer that they want every episode to have a short link that is their URL, forward slash, guest first name, dash guest last name. Because they always have a guest and it's easier for them to remember and to give people a link that way when they're texting people and they want it to be simple. Now you can do that, but I would recommend you just have a forwarding URL made for that because in the eyes of Google, you will do better with SEO when that permalink has the. Is more closely matched to the title. Again, there are exceptions. Doesn't always have to be exact.

Yeah, because sometimes you might put like apostrophe s. Google doesn't do that. So like it cuts it out so there's some kind of variation somewhere on it. But there is a setting in your WordPress website if that's what you're using for you to get it to set the name of your show, forward slash and the name of the title and to get it to do it so you don't have to create that permalink. It will create it for you properly every single time. The one thing I recommend is removing the date from the permalink. Do not use dates in your permalink because when you do give dates in there, you're giving Google an opportunity to say that's a little outdated. Maybe we don't want to serve it up, but if it's not there, there's no date in the permalink. It's not going to be there. That's not going to be a part of what they consider.

Okay, now really important tip for those of you, especially people that use that do have a WordPress website and if you've ever listened to any of our episodes, you know, Tracy and I are, I will say, biased. Although I'd really prefer to say we're right. But anyway, I will accept that we're biased that really we believe that majority of you out there for your website would be most best served by a WordPress website. And rather than Squarespace, Wix, Kajabi, whatever, you know, clickfunnels, especially all sorts of platforms out there. Oh, don't use the GoDaddy Builder, please don't do that. Anyway, the whole reason is.

Or podcast websites. Hate that one.

Oh my goodness. Well, that one's kind of old now. Today it's like PodPage. We see a lot of people. All these things are not as much in alignment with Google. We don't say this because we have anything to do with WordPress. We don't get any money from them. They're not advertising.

We're not even an affiliate, which we could be, we're not.

But it's just that more than half of the websites on the Internet are WordPress, and there are some good reasons why. And one of them is how much they are in alignment with Google. And there are lots of tools that help you with these things. And here's the tip about again, last little tip about blog metadata configuration. There are a couple of plugins, really good tools. The two most popular are Yoast SEO or All in One SEO. And they give you a roadmap and a reading of your post as you're creating it and saying, hey, hello, raising a red flag here. You should do this because that would be better for you. And you can get this every post as far and as close to being perfectly optimized as you can on your own just by following their lead. So that makes it really easy.

And I want to make it clear the free version is perfectly fine for most of you, especially in the beginning, until you really get into and like decide to get more tech into understanding some of the other data and other pieces of information that the PRO versions offer, which are still not very expensive. I highly recommend starting with that. I think all in One SEO is probably our, I'm going to call it our newest, most preferred, where Yoast is still. But Yoast I think is still a little easier to use. So like it's like six and one half dozen or the other, like totally your choice.

They're both good. Even our SEO professionals that we work with, we've had Melanie Gorman on the show a few times this year. She will say, well, if you don't already have one on your website and you're not used to one already, then she would recommend all in One SEO. But she's also the first to say there's nothing wrong with red. Yes, you can use that. I mean the incremental difference is not enough to change everything you're doing, but just use one of them. And although there are some other WordPress builders and themes that have something else built in, they might have something built into actually the form when you are editing or doing a quick edit of a post where you have metadata and keyword fields, and you certainly can do that too. Other platforms. Look, I'm sure some people are going to tell me, oh no, I have a WIX site and I'm never removing it. Okay, well, you know what, WIX has made some efforts to provide some more metadata and SEO configuration tools. It's still not to the depth and detail it really needs to be to match what's happening on other platforms. And then most of the other platforms really just don't even care about SEO at all. And that's the unfortunate reality of those things.

As we close out this episode, the one thing that I do want to say to you, because reminder that obviously you're podcasters out there, right, and the podcast matters most to you or you would be doing it, is that do not leave any field in your RSS feed unfilled out. Right? It's there for a reason. Now, some of them are outdated. I get we don't have that here in our poditized app and what we utilize with people, but if you've got subtitles and some of those other things, they are outdated and no longer in use, right? So there are some of those in some of the older podcast RSS feed companies, the posting companies out there because they were built a long time ago. I would say Blueberry and Libsyn probably have the oldest, most outdated fields. Some of those are. But if they were there, if they are there, use them. Because you're missing out on providing that data and there's so little data that the podcast search engine can use that you should be filling it out, using it to its maximum character count. Do it, because it is the one thing that you can do to make sure that your podcast gets served up to the right people.

All right, Tracy, I think that's a good place to wrap up this episode. It's been a long one. The technical ones tend to do that. I hope I didn't bore you too much. I do geek out on a little bit, but it comes from a place of care and concern. Want you to be found and heard by the maximum number of people. This is the way to do it, or at least the recommended way to do it. There are lots of ways to do it, but our opinion is don't leave any stone unturned. Let's multicast our content into every format and put it out everywhere possible. Why would we do anything less?

That's right. We're going to be trying some new things on the show here, so I want you to keep listening. Make sure you're subscribed here to feed your brand, especially if you've been watching this on the live stream. So make sure you subscribe to the episode. We're going to be doing some cool things and previewing our next episode coming up. Make sure and listen. Join us anywhere on social media. UnitedWePod and go to podcastersunited.org join us there. Sign up for our newsletter we send one newsletter a week. We do not send you bunches of email. We definitely don't send you marketing stuff because we haven't gotten organized in any way, shape or form. But there's this really cool AI newsletter on the other side, so please go ahead and go check it out. Podcasters united.org thanks everyone for listening. I'm Tracy Hazzard along with Tom Hazzard and we'll be back next week with another livestream and episode of Feed your branch.

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