I’m in the mood for SEO tips. Most site owners realise that in-coming links are all important to Google. You can’t get enough of them. It’s less obvious that out-going links can help too - well at least I’m fairly certain that they do.

When Google looks through your webpage, it pays particular attention to links. It rates these higher than ordinary content. You can tell that this is so, because search results tend to show up links in the brief summary of content.

So to use an example (as usual) from our own work - on Storynory we are publishing an audio book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s our biggest project and we want people to find it. There are loads of other audio books about Alice, so the competition is strong for a search phrase like “Alice in Wonderland Free audio”.  In the post, I’ve included three outgoing links to the best Alice background sites I could find on the net. This is a good service to our users - it also helps us with Google.

Incidentally, I’ve also made sure that the key words appear in the URL. I hope these SEO tips help people. I knew nothing about this subject a year ago, and Search Optimisation Companies charge a lot for their wisdom. It’s largely true that common sense and good content win through in the end.

Another short word about Quick Indian Cooking. Its author, Mallika, came up with the title and URL - even though we said she would never find a free address as good as that. But beforehand, we advised her to look for a URL with key words for search in it. It’s really important to get Search Engine Optimisation right from the start. Google looks at the URL and then the title at the top of the browser before most other other things. It takes a few months to kick in, but when it does, it’s hard to beat a site that has those vital key words in its url. Look at the success of cheapflights.co.uk for example. When people start to link to the site, they are likely to use those words, and reinforce the effect.
So this is our top SEO tip. Get the web address and title optimal for search.

Here’s a lovely new blog that we helped to set up. It’s called Quick Indian Cooking and is written by Mallika Basu, who works in public relations, and also happens to be a great cook. Mallika’s idea is that real Indian cooking can be quick, simple and tasty. In fact, simple is often best. I’ll be trying out some of her recipies, but I’m not sure that I’ll follow her tip about wearing a shower-cap while cooking to keep the smells out of the hair. Mallika, here’s my tip. It helps to be bald.

Blog Maverick and respected investor Mark Cuban predicts the dramatic decline of YouTube in an onslaught of Napster style law suits.  I’m not so sure. I think the media companies have moved on in the last year or two.  See the deal between Warner Music and YouTube.  At least some record companies have learned to live with the social distributors (copyright theives), and to use them to their advantage.  Universal is out of step with the times by leaning on YouTube.

I thought I would share my favourite del.iciou.us hack with you.  If you use del.icio.us you probably know that it’s great for spotting webpages and blogs with buzz , as its popular function tells you what’s being bookmarked in large quantities now.  If you are regularly hunting for a particular topic, you can set up an rss feed to keep you up-to-date.

I’m starting to blog more about kids stuff for our other site (sorry to bore you with Storynory but it gives my every day practical experience).  So I went to http://del.icio.us/popular/kids to see what people are book-marking with that tag.  But because it’s a pain to return to that page every day,  I have taken the RSS feed off that page and put it into my Bloglines feed reader.  I’ve done this with some other popular tags and it’s a great way to keep up to speed.  It throws up goodies all the time.  I recommend it.

Google Sitemaps keep on adding tools that help anyone who runs a website gain a better understanding of how people arrive on your pages. The top search queries table provides fascinating info. I’m hoping that the latest addition will solve an SEO problem for our Storynory site.

Google lists our pages as http://storynory.com without the www. The trouble is that our Google ranking seems to be split between the www address and the non www address. http://storynory.com has a ranking of 5, while http://www.storynory.com has 6, meaning it should come higher up in search results. Unfortunately, its the lower ranking address that’s listed. Now Sitemaps allows you to choose how your site will be listed in its index. Naturally I’ve plumped for www. It might take a while to update.

I reckon the best option, if your ISP will allow it, is to only give out one address with or without the www. This should avoid the problem all together. If you are using WordPress, make sure you have the Sitemaps plugin.

One of the few annoying things about iTunes for a podcast publisher (in general it’s wonderful because it’s levelled the playing field between indies and mainstream programme makers) is that it’s regional.  Even when I bring my laptop to America, I can still only see the UK iTunes rankings.  Here in Seattle, where I’m in the Exbiblio office this week, I’m using one of their beautiful Macs and I’ve logged onto the US iTunes for the first time.   I can see that our Storynory podcast is at number 8 in Kids and Family (It’s Numero Uno over in the UK most of the time).  Ahead of us are a couple of Disney podcasts and various Old Time Radio streams which make use of out-of-copy-right archives.  I can also see 10 very nice comments from users, all of which give us 5 stars out of 5.  Several mention how much they like the voice of Natasha, our story reader.  This is very satisfying.   We are also big in New Zealand this weekend!  A flood of visitors.  We are not quite sure why - perhaps a publication has written up Storynory.  We often notice that Australia is often our second-biggest download region.  There must be a lot of podcast listeners down-under.  My guess is that being further away from most of the English-Speaking world encourages the use of technology to stay in touch.

I read in the Media Guardian that only 17% of European iPod users pay for music downloads on a monthly basis.  This is not to say that the download market is insignificant.  Apple’s iTunes store had sold 200 million downloads at 79p each in Europe by last month.  However, it does show once again that we net-users are addicted to freebies.   It bodes well for podcasts, which are a largely free medium.  As I’ve said before, this business model is about brand-building and spin-offs, so that you can try to make in-roads into reputations of the likes of the BBC - which also is not big on selling things.  People still pay for books.  They still put up with a certain amount of advertising as a necessary evil.  This is where the money is.

My Sony Hi-MD (mini disc) kicked the bucket somewhat prematurely. It chews and chews on a disc without engaging. I suppose the mechanism got mangled on one of my trans-Atlantic flights. I had to drag myself into the modern recording age and invest 300 quid in a flash recorder, AND stump up another 25 for an SD memory card. And do you know what? It was worth it.

The Edirol R-09 by Roland of seventies synthesizer fame won’t win any prizes in a beauty contest. It looks more like an electric shaver than a digital recorder - but that hasn’t stopped me falling in love with it. I’m suspicious of in-built microphones, but those silver grills on the top are pretty good - fine for journalistic notes at any rate. The plastic record and play buttons are big and chunky, but they are dead easy to use without reference to the manual. Even someone like me who is all thumbs and struggles to send a text message can use them with ease. There are buttons on the back for mono or stereo, automatic recording levels, etc. Volume controls are on the side. In other words, you can do most things without scrolling through a menu on the LCD screen. Transfer of sound onto the laptop is a doddle. You plug it into the USB and it becomes an external disc. I just open up SoundForge on my computer and start editing away. I have a 2 Gig SD card so it holds several hours of audio.

And what about the quality? It records in mp3 or WAV, the latter being uncompressed and very high quality indeed. It’s 24 bit, which is ample. You might want more bits for recoding the Boston Philharmonic, but short of that it will do for most things. I find it works best with my microphone routed into the sound mixer via the Line In. When I plugged my Sure SM58 directly into the R-09 I got a certain amount of hiss. Not much, but discernible. Perhaps the impedance does not quite match (or some such technical guff). Edirol recommend buying one of their own external condenser mics, but they would say that, wouldn’t they. I might try a transformer. I would hate to buy yet another mic for out and about interviews, but it might come to that…

It’s fascinating how EMI and Universal are both starting free music downloads. We’ve come a long way since the music industry was suing the Hell out of Napster. It now seems to have realised that free media is a great way to build a brand, and that the profits lie elsewhere.

Brand building is also the model for blogs and podcasts. Steve Rubel lists his A_Z of money-raking schemes for blogs, but most advertising plans only bring in peanuts unless you dedicate your blog to a specific marketing niche (i.e. camcorders). Blog Readers are not in shopping mode. When you want to buy something on the net, you go to somewhere like Amazon or eBay or DABS. You don’t read a blog. The other way to make money out of advertising is to have tens of thousands of readers so that all those Google Adsense pennies add up. Only a few blogs make it that big. Most cater to a niche.

People do benefit financially from blogging and podcasting in indirect ways. Steve Rubel himself has clearly boosted his career in PR by blogging, especially with his move to Edelman. He’s probably one of the most famous PR people in the world now. Lots of people have sold books off the back of a blog (sex seems to be a big theme), and it’s possible to imagine TV shows and other spin-offs from YouTube and podcasting.

Giving it away does make sense on the net. But it does mean that you have to wait for the money to come in. The great thing is though, that the financial cost is containable and the opportunity for building a global brand is real.

I often hear complaints that when the mainstream media cover podcasting, they just go and talk to other mainstream media companies - ie newspapers, advertising agencies and the like.

I’m glad to say that the fourth Programme of The Communications Revolution on the BBC World Service did not fall into that trap. There’s an interview with some independent podcasters recording in a basement in Notting Hill - us - or more precisely, our Storynory podcast.

Natasha - our presenter - is reading a poem about a Spider and a Fly and I am being interviewed by the BBC’s Mike Williams. Natasha, as always, reads the poem beautifully.

Episode 4 of the Communications Revolution will be on the net for about a week in this location. Later on it will have its own page under the Documentuary Archive section of the BBC website. You can, of course, subscribe to the Documentary Archive as a podcast.