How To Make Podcast SEO Optimization Work for You

About this Podcast SEO Optimization Course

One of my most popular posts of 2015 has been about starting a podcast as a content strategy, and since then podcasts have been getting even more popular. We produce podcasts for clients, and help them with the launch strategies to get their podcast into iTunes New and Noteworthy. But sometimes it’s not just about having visibility on iTunes, increasingly clients are interested in using their podcast show notes content as a passive traffic driver to their own primary web site or to their show’s website.

So I’ve been coaching a lot of solopreneurs and podcasters on SEO, to help them position their show’s site and show notes pages, and showing them the tricks in making sure that podcast episode show notes are SEO optimized in order to contribute to a site’s traffic and ranking. Of course optimizing a podcast episode is almost identical to optimizing a blog post, so even if you do not have a podcast, read on…

What this podcast SEO course focuses on

There are a lot of mis-conceptions about how SEO works, and how to set up podcast episodes in a way that contributes to a sites overall rank with search engines. For the purpose of this series, we will focus on keyword research techniques and “On-Page-SEO”, in other words the art of creating fully SEO optimized show notes posts for your podcast episodes.

WordPress vs other CMS systems

We will focus on how to do this with WordPress, although the techniques discussed here a true for any content other management system. Even though we may discuss certain plugins in this post, we will cover what the plugins actually do step by step so that you can use it on non-Wordpress based sites.

“Link Building”

Link building techniques are still all a huge part of a successful SEO strategy, and is a huge topic by itself. The idea is that that your podcast guests for a show will reciprocate for the links you are creating to their site, by writing their own short piece of content that links back to your podcast show notes page, thereby providing valuable “google juice” and increasing the rank for your site. We will cover this in detail in a different blog series.

Podcast SEO Course Overview

Podcast SEO Concepts Overview

The high level topics of SEO optimizing podcast episode show notes we will discuss in this series are as follows:

1. Keyword Research
   How to research and choose a good key-phrase or keyword that is aligned with your content. This key-phrase should be what you think people might look for on search engines, and your content should be the perfect answer and fit for their question. We will discuss SEO concepts keyword difficulty scores.
2. Good Titles
   Once you have found a key-phrase you would like to optimize for, then the episode title, content and images of the show notes post will be subtly changed or “optimized” around this key-phrase. This is what we will go through step by step in this series of posts.
3. Search Result Visualizations
   How to design the way your post looks in search results by selecting right SEO Titles and meta-description, and testing this with “preview snippet”. Creating a compelling episode title as well as a great short description that shows up in search results is not only key in being found, but also determines how many people will actually click through once they see your episode title and description in search results.
4. Content Optimizations
   How to optimize paragraph headers (sometimes also known as H2 Tags), the main content text of your post ensuring the right “Keyword Density”, how to SEO optimize images, and why including them in your show notes is important.

A Note About Using SEO Plugins

Using Yoast SEO (Formerly known as WordPress SEO)

Yoast SEO (Formerly WordPress SEO by Yoast ) is one of the most complete and easy to use SEO assistance plug-ins. While there are other solutions out there, (Premium SEO Pack & All in One SEO Pack receive honorable mentions), I can highly recommend using Yoast, because it teaches the techniques needed step by step as you go through the process of optimizing each post, and it provides easy to understand feedback on how well each technique is implemented. So if you have a WordPress based blog or site, do yourself a favor and install this plugin.

Of course the use of a plug-in alone does not guarantee SEO success

• Plugins can assist, but there are certain fundamentals and principles that are key to understand in getting your podcast episodes to generate search traffic.
• What we will cover in this series are these fundamental SEO optimization concepts and steps of optimizing you content. So you can succeed with these tips without ever installing a plugin like Yoast SEO. It’s just that this plugin makes it easier, provides feedback and additional insights, and automates some of the more complex background tasks like creating an XML sitemap and submitting this to search engines automatically.

So I won’t go into the specifics of how to use the Yoast SEO plugin here, but there are may great tutorials and videos out there. If you are installing Yoast for the first time, here is my favorite setup post by Yoast himself, and what I like best is that he has kept this article up to date since the plug-in was first introduced in 2008.

• The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For WordPress Sites

Podcast SEO Course Overview

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