Podcasts have become an extremely popular medium for communicating and reaching large audiences. Professionals, Businesses and individuals are now using Podcast over blogging as it provides a powerful reachable voice to the people. Every Podcaster wants that their work should be heard by as many people as possible and preferably rank higher in search engines for specific keyword searches.

So how can you make sure that your podcast is optimized for search engines? Here are 5 important tips that you must take care of

1. Naming your podcast correctly is very important. Always include specific keywords in the title.

For example- if your podcast is on ‘Autism’, then your title could be – ‘Autism Symptoms’ of ‘Autism Statistics’. A title with the keyword ‘Autism’ is not recommended as there are many competing searches for that particular keyword. Be precise with the keywords helps as this helps in gaining visibility in search engines.

2. ID3 Tags – Make sure your MP3 files have really good ID3 tags with rich and relevant keywords. ID3V2 even supports comment and URL fields. The major search engines may not pick up the ID3 tags now, but ultimately they will.

3. Podcast Directories – Submit your files to popular podcast directories .Podcast directories receive thousands of visitors daily, so make sure that your podcast is submitted into the right section and subsection. This will make it easier for other people to locate your podcasts. Some of the top podcast directories are Podcast alley, Odeo, Podfeed.net, TECHpodcast.com, Podlounge etc.

A list of podcast directories can be found here - http://www.podcastingnews.com/topics/Podcast_Directory.html

4. Lastly, Transcription Service – Most podcasters Ignore this One. The most successful and profitable ones, don’t. Transcription is nothing but converting the spoken audio into text. Having a Text version helps tremendously in improving search engine ranking. This is because the Search Engine Robot (Such as Google Spider Bot) can easily read and index text but not audio. The only information about an Audio file that they can index are ID3 tags, which I discussed earlier.

Besides indexing, having a transcripts section of your podcasts is really good for listeners. People may not have the time to listen to the whole audio. So they can read the transcripts as it is much quicker.

So if you want your podcast to become more visible to people and search engines, then you need to follow the above steps. If done correctly, then over a period of time you will begin to see the fruits of you hard work.