The Importance of Podcast Meta Data

Podcast Meta Data – Important Stuff

Meta data comes in handy when you want people to find your podcast. Those who don’t have a direct link. Bet you want that, and since you are reading this article let’s guarantee that people will find your podcasts. Why wouldn’t you want that?

Literally metadata is, a collection of data that is used to tag and define information about some other form of data e.g. video, audio files etc. Simply, Metadata is a textual description of the information contained in another form of data that can’t be parsed by a computer. It is imperative for a podcast to have appropriate metadata for seach engines and podcast directories to be able to index it properly.

Most, if not all, directory and search engine indexers base their indexing on textual informaion containd on the web. With websites, blogs, articles etc. this is easier. However with audio, video and other such files its hard to parse the data to textual form and find out what the keywords are or what the discussion is about.

Thus, directories and search engines ask and look for the metadata attached with these files to index them properly. If the podcast isn’t indexed in the right category or sub-category it might never get to your target audience. Now that you have an understanding of what metadata is and why you need to use it lets find out what the best metadata practices are:

ID3 Tags:

ID3 tags are metadata tags you are asked to create when you convert your podcast to the mp3 format. This inherent data contained within your audio file will be picked up by search engines, music/audio players, directories and even some blogging platforms. Always fill out the whole form and enter information accordingly.
Typically, ID3 tag editors (usually your conversion software) will ask for the following information:

Header: This containes the primary tag word that defines your podcast.e.g. cooking, sports etc.
Title: Title of the podcasts, descriptive of the topic under discussion.
Artist/Owner: Your name as the podcaster or owner/produce of the podcast.
Album: Requires name of the series, if your podcast is part of a series. Otherwise create an album name that identifies with your target audience through a keyword.
Year: Self explanatory.
Comments: A description or summary of the podcast. This should be well-thoughtout and written with targetted keywords. Never in a spammy way though. Also, do not make the mistakes of adding the same tags to all your podcasts. That is counted as spamming by some search engines and directories. Use your target keywords smartly and don’t overdo it.
Track No: If your podcast is a series this would be the episode number making it part of a playlist of your podcasts. Or you can just put the number of the podcast you are publishing here.
Genre: This will determine the category of your podcast and it is presented in a drop down list of 255 genres you can choose from. You shouldn’t choose podcast if you can find a better fitting genre in the list for your podcasts. The genre should ideally be picked based on your target keyword or the topic under discussion not the type of recording you have produced. This will help you reach your audience too.

These are all the tags and best practices for entering them when you convert your audio for online distribution. Some directories however and the most popular one in particular (iTunes) will ask you to seperately tag your podcast submission for their indexers. Use the same principles, fill out the entire form, use keywords and do not use keywords in a spammy way.

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