The Podcast Search session, which I arrived at late, had some very interesting information though the room was not packed.   In other words, people at SES may not realize, yet, how important Podcasts and Podcast search has become.  Part of the reason the room was not full was there was an excellent search behavior session that compared recent studies about Eye Tracking from Google, MSN and Yahoo.  I suspect everyone felt that information was more interesting that Podcast Search.

But actually, they were wrong, because Podcasts are actually more actionable than anything that happened to be explained in the search behavior session.  Since I can’t clone myself, I decided to go with the Podcast session.

The big deal about Podcasts is you must optimize the Meta data in the Podcast really well, in order to get the most search engine visibility and traffic.  That is generally not well understood.  A Podcast feed should be optimized for meta data at both the CHANNEL and ITEM level and the ID3 tags; in fact, Yahoo’s Podcast crawler is designed to work best with Podcasts that have been optimized this way, and the Yahoo guy was very clear about that.

Here is the marketing information for this session

Podcast Search - Vertical Search Track

More and more people are "podcasting" on-demand radio-like shows people can listen to on MP3 players or their computers. This session looks at various search engines specifically for podcasts and how to best get your audio content found through them.
Moderator:
Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies
Speakers:
Daron Babin, Co-Founder, Webmaster Radio
Ethan Fassett, Product Manager, Audio Search, Yahoo!
David J. Ives, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, TVEyes
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

I missed Amanda Watlington’s presentation but got the rest.

Also, everyone spoke of using FeedBurner as the best overall way to optimize your feeds; you still need to use good SEO to write the best tag information and put alot of text in your descriptions, just like the guy from Webmaster Radio does, but having said that…..you really should use FeedBurner whenever possible.

Also, if you do the optimization right, tremendous traffic lifts can happen, and have happened to those who understand how to set up podcast distribution properly.

There are also a few distribution networks that people should use if they want to know how many active subscribers they have for a Podcast; Limelight is one, PodTrac is another.

I would say that Podcasting is still fairly new, fairly misunderstood as a marketing medium and still struggling to be find good monetization channels.  Some of that was discussed here as well, but I won’t go over it because it’s another post.