A podcast website is at the heart of your show
Ready and able: making your Podsite findable, linkable, and clickable.
In this month’s updates, we focused on making it super simple for a website visitor to find your podcast through SEO improvements and to support your show financially through new navigation and links in your episode notes.
We consider a podcast website to be a hub for any and everything about your show. Many pieces live inside your RSS feed — your episodes, your show notes, and the links and images within, for example. Other pieces of your show live around the web: on social media where your fans engage with you, on Patreon where your listeners support you, or in an email newsletter where your listeners receive regular updates (and ideally, you have links to all these in your RSS feed too). With this month’s Podsite updates, all those things are now both linkable and clickable on your Podsite.
And you don’t have to take our word for it: our new Gain interview series asks podcasters how they launched and promote their show, and their podcast websites are at the center of it all.
Podsite updates are guided by you, dear podcasters. If you have suggestions for what we should work on next or feedback about a current Podsite feature, send us a message at podsitehelp@radiopublic.com
SEO improvements
Part of why a podcast website is a gateway to audience growth is findability. People use web search constantly — 5.6 billion searches per day! — and we want to make sure your podcast is in the mix. Search engine optimization helps your podcast get found by people browsing the internet, and luckily, much of this optimization is helpful for humans interacting with your site as well as computers.
On the SEO front, your Podsite now has:
- Playable episodes from Google search results. If a podcaster includes their website URL in the <link> tag of their podcast’s RSS feed, their Podsite will play audio right from their search results. You can add your <link> tag via your podcast hosting provider.
- Human readable links. This goes for both episode links and article links, both of which help search engines. So rather than https://apodcastwebsite.com/episodes/ ef9d8925-371e-4bc3-b0aa-080d40d8bbee you’ll get https://apodcastwebsite.com/episodes/s1e5-how-to-make-a-great-podcast-website-s1!ba6ab
- Customize your metadata. By default, we can pull this information directly from your RSS feed. If you’d like to add more, you can now do so from your Podsite dashboard, including customizing your website meta description, title, and add keyword tags.
- Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml. These provide instructions for search engines, and says which urls are available to be indexed, respectively.
- High performance scores. We’ve taken the time to optimize Podsites for the things that Google and other search engines care about: performance, accessibility, best practices, and ensuring a great mobile experience.
Aesthetic updates
- Spanish language support. If your podcast RSS feed’s tag includes any es* language codes\, the copy — including the headers and links on your Podsite — will be translated to Spanish.
- More customization to site navigation. Two updates here: you can now rearrange the order of the links in your navigation and you can add new links as well. See how Radio Vimoh included a link to his bookshop and Dynamic Duel: DC vs. Marvel links out to both their merch page and their Patreon page (under Bonus Content).
- Clickable links in host bios. Add social media accounts or a personal website for each host. See it in action for Kiff VandenHeuvel’s host bio on All Over Voiceover.
- Share and embed episodes of your podcast, right from your Podsite. The coolest share modal we know of: beyond links to share on social media, you can text yourself or email a friend an episode of a podcast right from your website. Try it. It’s magical!
- Embed an episode right into an article. Grab any RadioPublic link, copy and paste it into an article draft, and voila! A clickable, playable episode, right in line with your text. Great for articles that accompany your episodes, or for an article highlighting your appearance on another podcast. See how that works on our own brand-new Podsite in one of our many Gain interviews.
- Article tagging. Organize your original writing with tags. See it in action one bullet point above: we tagged all our Gain interviews on our own Podsite.
Management updates
- Improved article editing interface. We added a formatting toolbar to the body of your article, so embolden, emphasize, ~~strikethrough~~, and order to your heart’s content. You can also add links, images, or embed content in your articles now, too.
- Easier login for podcasters to manage their Podsite. Two new ways to get to your editing dashboard faster: from a login link in the footer of your Podsite, or by adding /admin to the end of your Podsite URL.
- Help is just a click away. Submit a support ticket speedily from the blue “Help” button at the bottom of your Podsite dashboard.
Technical updates
- Improved formatting for episode show notes. We’ve expanded support for show notes to include images and clickable links so rich descriptions from more podcast hosting providers now show up as expected on your Podsite.
- Audio playback of longer episodes in Safari. Your listeners can now listen for as long as they’d like on your Podsite without skipping a beat.
Originally published at http://about.radiopublic.com on May 30, 2019.
