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30-03-2006
Podcasts are the
Handsome Prince to the Content King
And Sergey came down from the mount, screaming “Content is King,”
and the masses cheered for keyword density.
And with a motion, the Great Sea that is the Internet parted, and
the masses cheered for keyword density.
And the Webmasters rallied in their chariots like Pharaohs of times
past, speeding after the Googlites, into the parted Internet.
And Sergey, with a motion, brought down the crushing Sea to cries of
"but writers are so expensive!"
While the Googlites ushered forth to the mount, and the chosen
children played with their algorithms at the lap of “Big Daddy.”
And with a wink, Sergey nodded to his old Lit major friend from
Harvard.
And “Big Daddy” said, it is good for English students to write
comparative literature essays for failing programmers… because, what
goes around, comes around.
And the Sea was calm.
An excerpt from the Great Google Book, which I smuggled out of the
complex, hidden in the trunk of my Segway.
The greatest challenge for any Webmaster in today’s e-business world
is developing unique content, while continually enlarging a site to
build up backlinks. It is a circular condition. In order to be more
visible in the Search Engines, you have to continually build out your
site because the more indexable pages you have the better ranking and
level of perceived authority in any one subject you gain. The catch,
however, is that each page needs to be peerless; mirrored content
actually works against you, cutting page ranking and sometimes leading
to utter banishment from the “holy land” of Search. (Duplicate
content can kill,
ask the German division of BMW if you don’t
believe me.) But where are the answers? Obviously there are
cost restrictions and the need to make a living with your online
identity. So how can a Webmaster build out keyword rich content and
increase the number of links and indexable pages without going to the
poorhouse to do it right? After all, most Webmasters are not writers,
most don’t pretend to be, but too many have no choice but to become
writers just to remain profitable. Who suffers? - users that have to
wade through poorly written text, like an old man at a beach, using a
“relevancy metal detector” to find pertinent chunks of information to
take home.
Currently, the answers to everybody’s problems are Blogs. They are
lusted after by spiders (active ones anyways), if not in fact loved;
and the end-user doesn’t seem to mind that most are poorly written
diary pages – the kind your sister had under her bed and that after
you read, you wish you hadn’t – how many pages could she fill up with
“Mr. and Mrs. McDreamy?”. Besides, most of the Blogging community,
those reading them and those writing them, are techies anyway.
However, as search engines develop a sinful relationship with Blogs,
more and more Webmasters are getting calls from the Executive Suite to
“implement a Blog,” even if it has no real place on Barbie.com.
As of February of this year,
Technorati (a tagging service to
make Blogs indexable by search engines) tracks over 27.2 million
Weblogs and reports that the number of Blogs doubles every 5.5 months…
Like anything else that becomes increasingly popular, to a point of
becoming standard fare, some new innovation is going to have to take
the place of Blogging to keep a competitive advantage – always try to
remember that Sergey and Larry owe some Beatnick for helping them get
through The Grapes of Wrath…. I suspect that the Blogs are inevitably
going to be undermined by a new popular quarterback. The new kid on
the block is Podcasting.
Podcasting has been around for a while (since 2000), and as is with
any new technology, it has been reserved for the ranks of the most
brilliant of techno geeks. However, here we are in the first quarter
of 2006 and you can find Podcasts on any subject imaginable, from
religion to cooking (don’t ever mix the two, you are always guaranteed
that the Soufflé will fall). But what are they? Essentially, Podcasts
are syndication, which instead of text, contains audio or video
content that can be subscribed to via RSS (same as Blogs) or ATOM
feeds.
There have been a number of articles written about how to
create Podcasts, so I think I
will pass on fully explaining this, and instead focus on Podcasting as
content and how search engines view it.
Currently, a conventional search engine relies on the metadata
information associated with the Podcast file. Historically speaking,
Web content of any type has been poorly tagged and often mislabeled in
order to purposefully mislead the visitor or to attain higher
visibility. (Any Black Hats out there?) Over the years, search engines
have learned to assign less relevance to metadata and focus on the
actual content of the pages. (Neither of the Google boys will be
bullied any more, though, undoubtedly, High School wasn’t fun for
either of them – but here we are, billions later, and guess whose
laughing.)
In order not to buy into Black Hat tactics that can manipulate
relevancy, search engines are faced with the task of parsing media
rich information of audio and video Podcasts files, which is no easy
task. Some companies, like
www.blinx.com,
www.podzinger.com, and
www.podscope.com have developed
various forms of translating the audio part of Podcasts into text –
and having extracted the text; it is now possible to have a searchable
data base for all the search engine spiders.
In theory, this sounds great, but like any speech recognition
software, for instance, Dragon’s Naturally Speaking (www.nuance.com),
there is a huge time investment required to train the software to
recognize the unique inflections and tones of one person’s voice, let
alone thousands of people. While the approach of indexing Podcasts
using the voice recognition method is very exciting, I do foresee some
major hurdles that will have to be addressed before this approach
becomes feasible on a mass scale. First of all, it is extremely
difficult and resource (hardware) intensive to attain a reasonably low
error rate while performing these conversions. Secondly, the hardware
aspect is becoming less of an issue with current computing power, but
the Podcasts are getting more complex thanks to our advanced desktops
and the influx of visual arts school graduates willing to work for
peanuts. The error rate becomes even higher when you have multiple
speakers, with the possibility of accents and dialects, throw in music
and you can imagine how difficult the translation becomes.
With all these issues, it seems foolish of me to say that the future
is in Podcasting, but while it may still be in its infancy, Podcasting
is already making a large contribution to the web content. Why?
Because at the other end of every computer, what ever marketing
executive should know and most Webmasters can’t be bothered to
remember, is a person. Like it or not, people are motivated by
innovation, people are motivated by smoke and mirrors. Basically,
people are motivated by people; not facts, and not information but
other people. Podcasting gives you the ability to breakdown the fact
that online communication is really a conversation between a person
and a series of machines and bytes of data, to create an illusion that
the online environment is just the tiniest bit different from a coffee
house book club. It creates a perceived one-to-one environment. It
motivates action. It makes the online environment personable, and
anything that can make what is perceived as a removed interaction by
the majority, friendlier to an end user, will assuredly become more
and more popular as it becomes more and more effective.
So the real issue to Webmasters is how do you make a Podcast more
indexable, so that it can be found by more people and create the
biggest return. Well, let’s apply some of the traditional SEO methods.
-
First, look
through your web logs and note the search terms that people are
using to find you in the first place.
-
Second, when
creating your Podcasts, try to utilize some of the traffic
generating terms within the context of your recording - use these
terms to write effective title and description tags for your RSS
elements.
-
Lastly, help the
search engines find your Podcasts by increasing the number of links
to your page. (Traditionally, Page Rank has been derived from the
number of incoming links into pages; giving them credibility, but
opening the door for a lot of Black Hat procedures such as link
farms. The equivalent for Podcasts would be the number of
subscriptions; a “real” representation of actual credibility, one
that the search engines could and will eventually use as the basis
for Podcast Page Rank.)
As the popularity of Podcasts grows (trust me, it will), the
technology to sample and index them will emerge. (If nothing else, the
Google boys are always ahead of the curve.) In the meantime, don’t be
afraid to add media rich content to your site, Podcast today! The
return will be more noticeable in conversions than in strictly SEO
metrics; because, to quote Zig Ziggler, “signs don’t sell people,
people sell people.” Podcasts let you create the image of a person at
the end of the broadband, even if it is virtual, which should
translate to more conversions through product branding and resonance.
After all, it was that type of marketing that turned Dodge around when
Lee Iacocca took over….
Tom Abramowski, B.Sc
Search Marketing Consultant
Search Engine Positioning by
Searchengineposition
Enquiro Full Service
Search Engine Marketing
Source: Searchengineposition.com
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