Podcast Tags: Are They Still Relevant?

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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, everybody. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host for today. And today I want to talk about a subject I've been getting a lot of questions about recently, especially when it comes to SEO. SEO related questions. I'm not going to talk about SEO per se. We've talked about that in a recent episode. But I want to talk about tags, okay? I hear people all the time. Hey, there are podcast tags, there's video tags, there's blog tags. What are all these tags and should I care about them? Are they important? So I'm going to give you a little bit of history into where tags came from and then give you my informed opinion as to if they're important or not. Or more likely, where they're important and where they're not. Okay?

So in the early days of the Internet, I'm gonna call it Internet 1.0. Those of you that were in E commerce the way I was in the late 90s and the early 2000s, you know, might remember this. In those days, it was really pre Google. I mean, Google came to be, you know, around that time, shortly thereafter. But when I would go search for something, I would use a completely different search engine. It was called altavista. I don't know if anybody remembers that. And then it was, I think altavista was bought by Digital Equipment Corporation. I mean, it was very different. Internet searching was very different back then than it is today. And it's really what gave birth to all these different consultants and agencies to manage your SEO. Because back then, it was much more important to have somebody manage it who absolutely knew the tricks of the trade, you know, and how to hack the system, how to configure your website. So it would come up in search for all sorts of different words or phrases that people would type. And back then, the words that you came up for didn't even need to exist on your website, like on the public page. They could just be in the code on the back end of it. Right? Well, the Internet has matured. The World Wide Web, of course, which is really the modern Internet, has matured. A ton. We're definitely in Internet 2.0, at least, if not starting to sort of breach into 3.0 or 4.0. But things have changed quite a bit. But in the very early days, tags were a big thing. Tags are what software that ran search engines used to say, hey, is this article important or is this video important? Is this podcast important? It would. Instead of having to do the hard work of analyzing a blog post or the text on, on a main webpage of your website and saying, all right, what words or phrases are there and are they important? And should I rank this page for them? Should I serve up this page in the results when somebody types that word or phrase into my search engine? And so the words, they didn't really need to be on the page organically. They didn't need to really be a part of the content that was being served up. And that's how SEO hacking was able to happen. And, you know, coders learned what these search engines are looking for and served up that information, trying to serve up their clients web pages or blogs or whatever. So it was a very different time and a very different day. And the reality of Google for sure, and I'm just right now going to. What I'm about to say is specific to Google. Google is a highly sophisticated system of organizing information and serving it up to people based on what they search on. And it does not use tags at all. Now, there are some things that still do, and I'm going to get to that. So tags are not worthless. If you're getting to this point in the episode and you're thinking, oh, so I don't need to really care about tags, that's not entirely true. Hang on, we're going to get there. But. But they're just not as important as they used to be. And the reality is Google doesn't even use them. So there are other places though, that you will see tags referenced. For instance, if you have a WordPress website, every blog, if you. This is. If you create your own blogs on WordPress, you'll see in the sidebar, in the right sidebar on any WordPress blog blog builder, you know, which is what you would do if you're creating a blog, there is a little text box there where you can enter tags and it will let you do it. WordPress was created a long time ago when more search engines used tags. And so there's, you know, still an infrastructure there for you to enter in tags for your blog post in case a search engine uses them. But like I said before, Google doesn't use them anymore because Google has done something much more sophisticated, much more relevant today, and I would say much more valuable where they're making up their own minds. They're scanning every piece of content on your website, every blog, every page that has text on it, and they're deciding on their own to a large degree which words or phrases are valuable, which ones people are searching on and should they serve up your page on your website or your content, your blog, for the phrase or words that you've typed into their search bar. Now you certainly there are things you could do to optimize it to make a page on your website or a blog be I would call deep comprehensive content have a lot of value in it in terms of SEO through the eyes of Google, which in the modern Internet, Google search is really one of the only ones that matters. You know, interestingly, Bing, the search engine Bing, which has a very, very low single digit, I mean it may even be less than 1% of all Internet searches happen on Bing, but if it's not less than 1%, it's very low single digit percentage of, you know, Internet searchers are searching on Bing. Bing still uses tags. So if you want your content, your posts to be relevant to Bing, then, you know, keep putting tags in them because it's going to help you there, but it's not going to help you on the vast majority of search engines on the Internet.

So, you know, like I said, Google has their own algorithms. They decide what's important. There definitely are ways to optimize the blog post, make it be what I would call well rounded, holistically, have a lot of different aspects to it, have images in it, have text of different sizes and boldness, have links, outbound links, have images that are embedded within it with captions and those images can have actually tags. That's a different kind of tag. I should mention an alt tag in an image is actually the one place that actually Google still uses tags today. So I'm going to make this as sort of an exception to the earlier rule that I was saying. When you have, let's say you're doing a real estate podcast and you've taken a photograph of something on one of your properties and you give it to us not only for when you produce your episode, but to put it in the blog post for the episode, we'll certainly use it. We would always recommend, if you can take original pictures, provide them and we'll use them when we put them in your website, we load it into the website, and then it gets associated. You can put captions of text that will display below the image, but on the backside in the metadata, something you never see on a website. There is a place to enter in what they call alt tags for an image, and that actually is still used and does work to help images come up in Google Image. Search for certain keyword phrases. And in fact, very often, if you're searching on a certain keyword and you wanted to check out your competitors and see where they rank on a keyword phrase, don't just type it in. A normal Google. Also look at the image search results, because you might find images from a page on their website are tagged with those keywords or keyword phrases, and then their images will show up and it's another way people will find you that's, you know, very valuable. So we certainly use alt tags all the time. But in general, like I said, Google's gonna decide on their own why they're going to care about your webpage or your blog post, your article, you know, your podcast, whatever it is, your video. And they're gonna use their own systems to determine and their own, you know, analysis, I guess I would say, of the content to decide what's important. Okay, so that. So in terms of modern SEO, if you're paying somebody hundreds of dollars a month, and I've heard of people spending way too much money every month on some SEO expert, who is going to make sure you continue to come up for certain keywords at the very first page, at the top of the first page of Google Search, Honestly, I think you're likely wasting your money or certainly spending more than you need to. I think it's good to give your website an overall health check maybe once every six months, certainly once a year, and make sure that it's configured as it should be for certain keyword phrases. But the reality is there's not much to change on that from month to month. And the way Google is today, you can't rank for words or phrases that don't exist in the text copy of a page on your website anyway. So it's not like, hey, my homepage, I'm potatoes, here's my homepage. And if I don't mention episode production, and that's one of the keyword phrases I want to come up for. If it's not anywhere in writing, in text on that page, I'm never going to come up for it anyway. It doesn't matter what kind of configuration is done on the back end. So that kind of SEO configuration is very minor. You're not fishing in a pond with a lot of fish available, so you know to find. So you're playing in a very small pond with a lot of competition of others trying to all compete for the same keywords for their website to come up the way that you will come up. And I'm venturing a little more into SEO than I really plan to right now. But the way you're going to come up is by actually providing valuable content that has the words or phrases in it that you want to be found for. And we can do that with podcasting really well. You speak your way to it and then on video you're doing the same thing. You're just speaking your way through it on video. And eventually those things become a blog when you work with us at Potatoes. So, you know, be aware of that. But let's get to podcasting for a minute because in the early days of podcasting, tags were a big deal there too. Okay? And in fact, on a lot of different podcast hosting platforms, you know, Poditize is one, but the, you know, Libsyn or Podbean or SoundCloud, and you know, Spreaker, Buzzsprout, there's lots of different podcast hosting platforms out there. And if you are on one of those platforms, if you've ever gone in and looked at your show information for your show listing or at the episode level and episode information, they have fields available where you could put tags in there. However, I'm here to tell you from a technical back end perspective, those tags are doing nothing anymore. They did 10, 15 years ago in the earlier days of podcasting, but today, Apple, who again Apple, is still the king of the hill when it comes to podcasting. Even though their market share is being eroded by some other players, they are still, for most podcasts, more than 50% of your plays of your podcast. And I know because we built our own platform poditized to host podcasts, that there is absolutely nowhere in their system that still pays attention to tags. They don't. So it's a waste of time for most podcasters to configure the show or their episodes for certain tags. Now, while so far I've given you a lot of reasons why you don't need to worry about tags, and they're not very important. There is one platform and one medium where tags still play a very large role, and that is on YouTube, your videos. So if you are like about half of our podcasters and you record your episodes not only as audio, but also as Video, we're editing your videos, and we are putting them out on YouTube. YouTube has a very large field to put tags, and they can not just be single words, but they can also be single words, but they can also be, you know, phrases. So on YouTube, you can. On YouTube, when we put your videos up there, or when any of you put your own videos up there, you absolutely should be putting in tags. Because YouTube's search bar, which is the number two search bar on the Internet now, it's a very distant number 2, a distant second to Google, but it is the number two search engine. They do use tags, and I don't really have a lot of information as to why, but I know they do, and I know it actually it works. So in addition to, like, other mediums, like podcasts and, you know, podcasts, your title and description are the primary source of information that the podcast app search bars will search through. They don't use tags on YouTube. They're using both the title and description and tags. And you can put a lot in there. What I do, I have my YouTube, and we do this with most of our clients. If there are certain keyword phrases you really want associated with your brand or your show all the time, you can create a default, you know, a default setting within your YouTube channel. Whenever you upload a new video, it's gonna put in all those same tags in the tag field to start with. And in the description field, if you want to have links to your website and some information about, you know, your company that you're gonna put more of a unique description for that video above that, you can again, populate those things so that you don't have to redo that every single time you post a new video, they're already gonna be there. It's kind of like a template, but you want to put a unique title and description in YouTube videos, but you also want to put tags. And basically that's any phrases that you think people might search on that you want this video to come up for. And when you think about, as I'm thinking about YouTube and why they still use tag, it's sort of making more sense to me as to why, because there's not a large body of text that their search algorithms can be going through in order to rank and find your video instead of other people's. So what do they have to go on your title, your description, and tags? So they need that information to be able to help it come up. So that makes sense.

So again, YouTube is the place where tags are most important. And we use them all the time. Blogs, we don't use them anymore. There was a time, maybe five, six years ago where we were still putting them in because there was a little bit of uncertainty as to whether they were important or not. I could tell you now from experience, they're really not that important. In blogs, we don't even bother. And then podcasts, that also absolutely makes no difference. It's not important. What's good about that? That tags have become less important in podcasting and especially in blogs, is that what it means is the search bars are serving up content based on searches that are related more to titles, descriptions, or the actual body of text. And it's genuine, it's authentic, Meaning that the content really does relate to what that search criteria is. And that's what you want. I mean, that's everything we're doing here at Potatoes and with all of our customers is to make sure that they're seen, heard, and found because of the content they're creating, not to hack it and make, you know, bait and switch. Hey, we're gonna use these keywords and are gonna have this other content show up when they were really looking for something else. No, that's like a spam type of technique. And we're not doing that. We're creating real, valuable, genuine, authentic content that people will find. And based on what they search and no matter what we might want to happen, podcast tags, blog tags, they're not going to help you do it. Video being the one notable exception. It still works on YouTube, so well worth doing there. All right, so there you have it. There's my take on tags. Everything about tags, if you've ever wondered, and are these important? Why am I caring about tags? Should I care about tags? Do we need to waste time on it? My opinion is no, you don't. Unless you're publishing a video to YouTube, and in that case, you do. All right, so that'll do it for this episode of feed you'd brand. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. I'll be back next time with another great episode. Until then, have a great one.

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