Summary: Regardless of whether you use WordPress or a different blogging platform or content-management system, how you title your blog posts and, by extension, your podcast episodes greatly affects your searchability and even your usability. These steps will assume that you are using WordPress and heavily rely on permalinks (called "friendly URLs" and similar in other systems). Whether I say "blog post" or "podcast title," I am referring to essentially the same thing. Hire me to design stuff for you! Make your message look great by hiring me to personally design your website, presentation, podcast cover art, and more! Visit D.Joseph Design to view my portfolio and request an estimate. Additional sponsor: visit gotomeeting.com, click the Try It Free button and use promo code "Podcast." 1. Full episode titles Imagine you downloaded a podcast episode called "Episode 5." Does that tell you anything about the general or specific theme of the episode or the topics covered within it? No! It only tells you that it is an episode and what number it is. Instead, include a full title. Titles can be relevant, like "Shownotes URLs for Search-Engine Optimization" for this episode, or they can be fun and spark curiosity, like those of the Ramen Noodle™ and other light-hearted podcasts. If yours is a more formal podcast covering specific topics, consider a title that reflects this. The title is the first thing people will see about that episode and will influence how they prioritize their listening to your episode. Thus, "Important Announcement" (as I'll reuse later) also tells your listeners nothing about the episode. Why not include the announcement in the title? 2. Front-load the titles I have seen podcasts follow the format, "My Totally Awesome Podcast, SPECIAL EPISODE 5: Important Announcement." Although it may be okay to speak this format within your podcast, it is not good in writing for a couple reasons. Displays poorly and hinders usability Nearly all portable digital audio players don't have enough screen space to display a full episode title, so they probably scroll it. When I have episodes titled as above, then my device will probably dim the screen before it gets to telling me even the episode number, let alone the episode's title. The same goes for computer displays, such as the columns in iTunes, where it may be cut off. Hurts searchability Search engines read content very much the same way that newspapers are written: headline first, first paragraph, subsequent headings. Having an episode title as above means that Google and other search engines will see "My Totally Awesome Podcast" more prevalent than "Important Announcement." Instead, move the title to the front Front-loading titles means moving the important stuff to the front. Like newspaper articles in which the first paragraph is a summary of the article to follow. Treat your titles and blog posts like that. I get emails from mystery shopping places that use a format similar to the above episode title for their subject lines. The problem is I have to always open the email (or just delete it) before I even know what kind of shop is available to perform. You could list your episode title as, "Important Announcement (My Totally Awesome Podcast, Episode 5)," which is nicely front-loaded (of course, make the title more relevant), but that presents another problem, which we will solve next. 3. Abbreviations and episode numbers Sometimes abbreviations are good, many times they are not. However, I think they would be preferred in podcast titles when you need to communicate which podcast it is and the episode number. Instead of "My Totally Awesome Podcast, Episode 5," try "MTAP005: …." This provides chronological sorting for devices that may not properly sort your episodes (my iPod frequently does that) and it tells your listeners which show and episode number it is without taking up a lot of space to do so. 4. Include important, relevant keywords
