There are a lot of reasons why we love to use WordPress blogging software — it’s a straightforward install, highly customizable, extremely SEO-friendly, and with its latest release, it’s jam packed with more features than any other blogging platform out there. And did I mention that it’s free? And open source? It’s just a no-brainer.
It gets better, though. WordPress makes starting a podcast as easy as posting a complete URL link to an MP3 in your post. That’s it. WordPress handles the XML enclosure, and you can even assign your podcasts all a unique category to make a podcast-only feed. As someone who manually wrote XML enclosures for months in the early days of podcasting, the no brainer approach made possible by WordPress is hugely appreciated.
Yet, it still gets better. Feedburner and WordPress are a very attractive pair, and with Feedburner you can further customize the output of the XML feed, for optimal reading in podcasting clients from iTunes to Juice. While you can do same with some of the very good WordPress podcasting plugins out there, Feedburner integrates all the bonus podcasting information with its other great features, such as exceptional feed usage statistics, XML optimization, social media integration, blog search pinging, etc…
All the tools are widely available, and while it requires a fair amount of tech savvy to get started, it’s not nearly as serious a project as it was in the early days. The real challenge comes with coming up with the content to make using these tools worthwhile!
Anyways, if you’re wondering why we’ve taking a radical turn off from the beaten SEO path, it’s because we’re just about to unwrap a new addition to this blog that we’ve been working on for some weeks here at Hall — an SEO Q&A podcast called SEO Audio. Stayed tuned for the first episode this afternoon!