What You Need

To create an audio podcast, you need 3 things: a microphone, a pair of headphones and some recording software. Cheap microphones will work if quality isn’t important. Obviously, better mics produce better sound. Headphones are needed to monitor the sound without the mic picking up speaker noise or feedback.

Podcasting News has a great list of publishing software, most of it free. Audacity is a free, cross-platform open source audio recording software that seems to be popular. There’s an excellent tutorial on Audacity complete with screenshots at windowsdevcenter.com. for For more serious podcasters, you could also use industry favorites such as BIAS Peak (Mac), Sony Sound Forge (PC) and Apple’s GarageBand.

How You Do It

The first steps are to record your podcast and make any edits you want with your sound editing software. You should also edit your ID3 tags so that portable media players will be able to get important info about your podcast. You can edit ID3 tags in most media players such as iTunes or Windows Media Player. Once you have your file the way you want it, upload it to your server.

The final step is to prepare your link for syndication. For this, you need blogging software with support for enclosures. Enclosures are a method to let news aggregation clients know that a file attachment is associated with an RSS feed entry. If your blogging software doesn’t support enclosures, you can use a Feedburner account. The rest is easy — just create a blog entry like you normally would with a title, link to your MP3 file and a description. If you want to keep your podcast separate from your regular blog entries, you can use a service called Liberated Syndication which will upload your file and create the RSS feed in one easy step. Voila. Podcast.

Edited addition, March 11, 2007, 4:35am: Holy Moly! I was just wandering around in Aarron’s blog to see what I could learn and decided I’d be brave and try to download a podcast. Scratch everything above! He’s using a site called Talkr.com that automatically reads his blog posts and converts them into podcasts! I had no idea! Things you learn in the wee hours of the morning.

What Are They?

Ok, so maybe talking about podcasts on a blog about findability is stretching things a bit. However, since we have an opportunity to create a podcast for extra credit, I needed to know more about it. What better way to learn than to have to research the subject for these posts. So let’s jump in.

Podcasts are media files that are distributed over the web via RSS feeds. The name comes from Apple’s music player, the iPod. Like other web-delivered media files, podcasts can be either streaming or downloadable. Unlike other web media files, podcasts can also be downloaded automatically via RSS or Atom. Podcasts are usually thought of as either audio or video files, but they can also be text, images, PDFs or any other type of file.

Where Do I Find Them?

Basically, everywhere. Apple and Yahoo! both seem to have extensive catelogues of podcasts. There’s also a podcast.net, a Podcast Alley and a podcast.com. In addition, you can also get podcasts from NPR, CNN and probably all other news agencies. Conferences are using podcasts to broadcast their sessions, teachers are using them to deliver their lessons, and bosses are using them to deliver information to employees. If you’re interested in it, there’s probably a podcast for it.

How Do I Listen To Them?

First, you need some software for your computer that will download podcasts for you. This type of software is called an aggregator or sometimes a podcatcher or podcast receiver. Podcasting News lists over 100 different aggregators for PC, Mac, Linux/Unix, Palm OS, Pocket PC and just about everything else. Most are free downloads. There are some great step-by-step tutorials on the web that will walk your through using your software to subscribe to feeds. An especially thorough one is at windowsdevcenter.com. You can then listen to or watch your podcast with your favorite media player — either on your PC or with a portable device.

Once you’ve selected your keywords in WordTracker, you’re taken to a page that gives you more detailed information on your search. Specifically, you get information on KEI Analysis, Count, 24Hrs and Competing. Each of these will be discussed separately.

KEI Analysis

KEI Analysis stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index and is basically a ratio between the number of times a keyword appears in WordTracker’s database and the number of competing web pages that use that keyword. The KEI will increase as the popularity of the keyword increases. Similarly, KEI will decrease as it has more competition, i.e., as more sites are using it. A high KEI means that your keyword is more popular and has less competition, which means you have a better chance of getting to the top.

Count

Count refers to the number of times a keyword appears in the WordTracker database. WordTracker gets their results from Metacrawler and Dogpile, both of which are metacrawlers that search the results of the major search engines.

24Hrs

The number in the 24Hrs column is an estimate of how many times people will search for that particular keyword in the search engine the results are posted for. Since I was just using the free trial, I was only given results for MSN. However, if you subscribe to WordTracker, all the major search engines are covered.

Competing

The number in the Competing column represents the number of web pages that also contain that keyword. The lower this number is, the better chance you will have of a high ranking in the search engines.

Using these figures together – and especially the KEI – can help you choose effective keywords for your niche. In general, a KEI between 10 and 100 is considered a good one to use, below 10 is a poor choice and above 100 is excellent.

I had chosen 17 keywords and my highest KEI was 1.659 for the keyword “depression”. Doesn’t look real promising. However, if I ran another search trying to drill down some, my results might be different. For example, if I were living in Atlanta, feeling depressed and looking for a therapist, I wouldn’t just type in “depression”. I might type “depression Atlanta psychologist” or something like that. In any event, WordTracker does seem to deliver a lot of useful data for choosing keywords.

Yahoo! Keyword Selector Tool

As part of my site redesign plan, I decided to do some research on keywords. The first one I tried was Yahoo’s. Yahoo! Has a tool called “Keyword Selector Tool” that gives information on related searches that include your term and also the number of times that term was searched for during the last month. When I first built my site, I had assumed that important keywords would be “Psychotherapy” and “Atlanta”. I didn’t really need a large or a wide audience, but I did need for people wanting a therapist in Atlanta to be able to find me.

I entered “psychotherapy” in the Keyword Selector Tool. There had been 34053 searches for “psychotherapy” in January, 2007. The related terms were interesting. Many of them were things like “theory and practice of . . . “ which probably represented students and/or researches looking for resources. Others were things like “the complete adult treatment planner” which probably represented other clinicians looking for resources.

Then I entered “psychotherapy Atlanta” and “psychotherapy in Atlanta, Ga” and was surprised to find that NO one had searched for either of those terms in January, 2007. Hmm. I have some work to do here. The keywords I have been trying to promote for my site aren’t ones that people search for.

I tried “psychologist”. 102454 searches in January. Now we’re getting somewhere. Evidently people search for the word “psychologist” almost 3 times more than they search for psychotherapy. And also, many of the people who do search for the term psychotherapy are other professionals, which isn’t the audience I hope to target. Hey! And 586 people searched for “psychologist Atlanta”! Here’s another thing that surprised me – only 28 people searched for “psychologist in Atlanta” which suggests that most people are computer saavy enough to know that you don’t have to list all the little words when you do a search.

NicheBot

I decided to compare the results I got on Yahoo!’s Keyword Selector Tool with other similar tools. I went to NicheBot and frankly, I was so confused and turned off by their site that I left in frustration after about 15 minutes of poking around. It’s VERY wordy and looks like spam. Sort of hard to take it seriously even though it’s supposed to have a good reputation. Every time I clicked on one of their tools (and they have a wide variety), I got a page wanting me to log in. That’s cool – I was willing to do that – but when I clicked on the link to register, the page was totally overwhelming. Just for fun, I copied it and put it into a Word doc. Turned out to be 26 pages and over 12,300 + words. I have no idea what that page (or rather, those 26 pages) were trying to tell me. I left the site and decided to move on to WordTracker.

WordTracker

Ah. WordTracker is like a soothing balm after NicheBot. The site looks professional and right up top and easy to see is a “Take a Free Trial” link. I have to admit I feel a bit of trepidation when I see that they, too, want me to sign up. However, they assure me that they won’t bombard me with email and their site looks pretty respectable so I take the plunge.

I am not disappointed. WordTracker’s goal seems to be to help me find words that are related to my keywords. I entered “psychotherapy” and got this list of related keywords:

1. psychotherapy
2. therapy
3. psychology
4. Psychotherapy
5. mental health
6. therapist
7. psychiatry
8. counseling
9. psychologist
10. depression
11. psychotherapist
12. anxiety
13. family therapy
14. trauma
15. Depression

Clicking on the various terms on the list confirms that people search for “psychology” (1811 Dogpile & Metacrawler searches in the last 90 days) more than “psychotherapy” (222 similar searches). Also, “psychologist” got 540 hits.

This has been an extremely helpful exercise and one I wouldn’t have thought to do on my own. Basically, I learned that the keywords I thought might bring me the most hits were a bit off-track, AND I got a good idea of which ones to try instead.

Ok, so back to my site redesign/move issues. In a previous post, I had written that search engines search by domain name, not IP address. This week, I found some contradictory information that claims that some search engines DO search by IP address instead of domain name.

This article was first published in ’03 and updated in April ’04 so it may be outdated. It’s also possible that the major search engines search by domain name, but some of the minor ones search by IP address. I’m not sure it’s worth spending time trying to figure out what’s what since it could change next week. However, a safe bet would be to assume the worst – that they search by IP address – and keep your old site up for a few months while you’re redirecting traffic to your new site. During this time, check your traffic stats to watch for search engine spider activity at both the old and the new sites. Once the major search engines have crawled your new site, you can take the old one down.

The best ways to redirect traffic are either 301 redirects, which I discussed in an earlier post, or mod_rewrite. I tried to find a solid source that could tell me why you would use one of these over the other. I don’t feel I’ve found “the” answer yet, but it seems like if you’re making a lot of page and folder name changes, that mod_rewrite might be easier. However, mod_rewrite is only for servers running Apache, whereas I think 301s can be used with other server software.

That being said, what exactly is mod_rewrite? It’s an Apache module that rewrites a requested URL on the fly. It’s very search engine friendly and while it looks like gobbledygook since it works with regular expressions which always make my eyes cross, there are places all over the web where you can copy and paste what you need. There also seem to be a number of forums for asking mod_rewrite questions if you get stuck. Mod_rewrites are put in the .htaccess file.

One use of mod_rewrite that I saw popping up quite a lot is a concern over Google seeing yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com as two separate URLs. This is referred to as the “Google Canonical problem” and the reason it’s important is that it can split your stats (two pages with 500 hits each won’t rank as high as one page with 1000 hits) and/or give you a duplicate content flag. The mod_rewrite code for making sure Google will see one site instead of two is:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301]

Since our exercise with microformats didn’t happen last week, I decided to research it for one of this week’s posts and see if I can learn a bit more. I decided to check out Sandy’s blog because I remember seeing that she had written about microformats so I figured I might learn something there. Also, Sandy and I are swapping links so we can learn about TrackBacks. Two birds with one stone.

So, Sandy has THREE posts on microformats! The first one is called Technorati and Microformats
and I learned a bunch there. We discussed Technorati in class and I’ve read a bit about it, but there’s something about reading a classmate’s description of it that gives it a fresh perspective and makes it more understandable. Maybe it’s the peer quality; makes it less intimidating and therefore easier to digest. So what I got is that Technorati is essentially a search engine for blogs. You can claim your blog there so others can find you more easily and you can also use it, as Sandy pointed out, for seeing what other people are saying about topics that interest you. The neat thing about it is that it pretty much operates in live time. You can get updates on new posts every 60 seconds. Cool!

Sandy’s second post is called Detecting Microformats and talks about the Firefox plug-in and how it’s still buggy for 2.0.

The third post is called vCard: Evolution to Microformats and talks about how the address book format of vCard has been transformed to work on the Web via the hCard.

There ya go, Sandy. Some TrackBacks for you and some additional learning for me. : )

One thing I ran across while looking for the best way to minimize search engine dips when doing site redesigns is the notion of a 301 redirect. I had never heard of a 301 before but the more deeply I dug into my research, the more it became clear that I was going to have to have at least a preliminary idea of what a 301 is.

Basically, a 301 redirect is some code you can put in your .htaccess file for servers running Apache. It tells spiders that a page has moved permanently, giving both the old and new URLs. 301s can be used for entire sites or for specific files within a site.

People seem to agree that a 301 is the best way to go when changing domain names or relocating or renaming certain pages on your site. With domain name changes, an older domain name will generally fare better than a newer one, but even so, having a 301 in place will help minimize the impact of the change.

One solution to this that might be the best of both worlds might be to go ahead and build the new site, 301 the new pages to the old, wait a year, then 301 the old pages to the new. For example, for my page

http://www.bend-in-the-river.com/qapersonality.html

I could build basically the same page in my new site (with the domain name alias reversed as discussed in previous posts), and, to help with findability, change the URL to

http://www.susanlitton.com/personality-disorders-questions.html.

I could then put a 301 on the susanlitton page to redirect it to the bend-in-the-river page. After a year, I could switch it: 301 the bend-in-the-river page to the susanlitton page.

Writing 301s doesn’t appear to be difficult. For specifics on how to write the code, I found this article helpful:

Giving search engine spiders direction with a 301 redirect

I’ve had fun and a fair amount of success in tracking down the answers to my questions about how a total overhaul of my site will affect my search engine rankings. In some cases, the answers are straightforward; in other cases, an answer has lead to another question. Here’s what I have so far:

Q: I’ve been wanting to transfer my site to a different hosting company but I haven’t known how (or if) that will affect my site’s search engine ratings.

A: The answer to this seems to be “No”. That answer told me an important piece of information I hadn’t had, namely that search engines search by domain name, not IP address.

Q: When I first created the site, the domain name I chose was bend-in-the-river.com. I published the site with that domain and then a bit later, decided to also use susanlitton.com. Since the site was already up, I ended up putting susanlitton.com as an alias. I’d like to switch that out — have susanlitton.com as the main domain name and bend-in-the-river as the alias. Will that change affect my ratings?

A: A tentative answer to this seems to be “Yes” with the added bit of info that an older domain will fare better than a newer domain. However, there seemed to be some disagreement and/or lack of clarity about how an alias actually works. I solved this dilemma by writing to my hosting company. Here’s their response:

The alias works via redirection from the zone records.
Zone records are basically a table that resolves domain names to i.p. addresses.
Thus, susanlitton.com has a zone record that tells servers looking for susanlitton.com to go to bend-in-the-river.com. The advantage of having an alias is that all e-mails going to susanlitton.com get forwarded to bend-in-the-river.com.

To show it visually…

bend-in-the-river.com has 66.113.130.214 as it’s i.p. address.

susanlitton.com also has 66.113.130.214 as it’s i.p. address.

I don’t know if all hosting companies do an alias this way, but I was happy to at least see how one company handles it. A solution to this concern seems to be to use a 301 redirect. More about this in another post.

Q: I also thought that at some point, I’d like to convert the site from HTML to PHP, but again, I haven’t known if that would mess things up.

A: Again, this question got a bit of a mixed review. However, people seem to agree that to a search engine, index.php is seen as the same as index.html. If you have any doubts, though, it seems that adding the trailing slash at the end of the URL will clear it up as well as possibly speed up your site a bit. (See waferbaby’s Slash Forward (Some URLs are Better Than Others))

Q: If I decide to include the site in my portfolio, it’s going to need major overhaul. In fact, although the content and the overall site architecture are still OK and I’d keep most of the images, I’d probably have to do pretty much everything else from scratch. How will that affect the ratings?

A: Short answer is that there will be a dip. Again, a 301 redirect will help here and I’ll explore that in my second post tonight.

Q: I’d like to use some of the tips and tools we’ve been studying in class to find out all I can about what is and what isn’t working to help people find my site.

A: The only thing I’ve done on this so far is sign up for Mint. I think it will be way cool to log some of these early stats and compare them throughout the process of my redesign. But see . . . even this brings up a question for me. I signed up for Mint using the main domain (www.bend-in-the-river.com). Since I now know that my alias has the same IP address, will Mint automatically give me stats for both or do I need to buy a separate package for www.susanlitton.com? I haven’t had a chance to look at Mint yet or figure out how to use it so hopefully when I crack it open, that answer will be obvious.

The first step in applying what we’re learning about findability to my psychotherapy site seems to be to compare my site to the nuts and bolts findability techniques. No tools or analytics or cool stuff yet, just the basics:

The Good

• The site has a lot of content and the content tends to be fairly keyword rich. This is largely due to a 17-page Questions & Answers section.
• The titles of each page start with “Psychotherapy in Atlanta, GA: Susan C. Litton, Ph.D. — ” and then have the name of that section, e.g., Philosophy of Therapy, Articles, Questions & Answers: Attachment Disorders, Questions & Answers: Personality Disorders, etc.
• The URLs contain some form of the main word for each page, e.g., the URL for the Philosophy of Therapy page is http://www.susanlitton.com/philosophy.html.
• I built another psychotherapy site for all the therapists in our practice and my personal page on that site includes a back link to my main site.
• I have links to my site in a signature I use for a mental health message board I monitor for iVillage.com.
• There are meta tags for both keywords and descriptions for each page on the site.
• There are a fair number of internal links on the site and the text of the links tend to be keywords. Again, the best example of this tends to be on questions pages, e.g., Abuse Questions.

The Bad

• With a couple of minor exceptions, the only changes I’ve made in content to the site are the yearly updates to the copyright date. There have been years that I haven’t even gotten around to doing that.
• The URLs could be done a lot better. For example, in the Questions & Answers area, although the main keyword for the page does appear in the URL, the keyword for each question page is prefaced with “qa” and the keyword for each answer page is prefaced with “ans”. For example, the URL for the page of questions pertaining to abuse is:

• Headers for each page are graphics and although they do have ALT tags, the anchor tags don’t have title attributes.
• The layout was done with tables and the tags have none of the attributes that would help search engines locate content.
• There’s no sitemap.

The Downright Ugly

• The home page is in Flash. There is a link on the home page to a non-Flash version but I don’t know how effective it is.
• The site doesn’t validate. There’s some real scary stuff in there.
• The site doesn’t even give a nod toward accessibility standards.

As you can see, the site needs some serious help. Stay tuned next week for the upcoming installment in this findability project.

Been mulling things over and have come up with a way to learn that excites me: I’m going to try to apply the things we’re learning in our Findability class to a real world project I need to do. The project is my psychotherapy site. I built it before I ever started taking classes at the Art Institute so the coding is a mess. No. A MESS. A peek under the hood would be an embarrassment. However, it generally ranks fairly high in Google and my referrals have increased exponentially as a result of the site.

There are several objectives I’d like to accomplish with this. Some of the tasks I have in mind will give me some answers I’ve been wanting for my site; some will help me learn the findability class material better; most will do both. One of the problems with my site is that I’ve been afraid to change anything because I haven’t wanted to mess up my search engine ratings. However, there are some changes I’ve really been wanting to make on the site so using this class as an opportunity to learn seems like a great idea. Here are the objectives:

• I’ve been wanting to transfer my site to a different hosting company but I haven’t known how (or if) that will affect my site’s search engine ratings.
• When I first created the site, the domain name I chose was bend-in-the-river.com. I published the site with that domain and then a bit later, decided to also use susanlitton.com. Since the site was already up, I ended up putting susanlitton.com as an alias. I’d like to switch that out — have susanlitton.com as the main domain name and bend-in-the-river as the alias. Will that change affect my ratings?
• I also thought that at some point, I’d like to convert the site from HTML to PHP, but again, I haven’t known if that would mess things up.
• If I decide to include the site in my portfolio, it’s going to need major overhaul. In fact, although the content and the overall site architecture are still OK and I’d keep most of the images, I’d probably have to do pretty much everything else from scratch. How will that affect the ratings?
• I’d like to use some of the tips and tools we’ve been studying in class to find out all I can about what is and what isn’t working to help people find my site.

So . . . several questions to research and then some activities to do.