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.