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In looking forward into next year there are certain things we can be sure of.  That the engines will continue to improve their algorithms and that new tools will be added to the SEO/SEM toolkit.

In this article I look at one of those tools as well as some of the potential drawbacks to the new medium.

You know something is going to be big when a dictionary makes it the “word of the year.”

And that’s what the New Oxford American Dictionary has done with the word “podcast.”

For those who don’t know a podcast is let me explain it.  It is essentially an audio blog.  Rather than typing everything into a blog, many people are turning to audio files such as MP3s to host their rants, thoughts and interviews.

The most recent stats I found showed that there were a mere 212 podcast feeds available in November 2004.  By May 2005 that number had grown to well over 5000.  I would think that there are likely closer to 10,000 out there now (I did a search on the Yahoo Podcast site and came up with almost 9,800)

Podcasting is relatively easy to get into.  All you need is a computer, a microphone and an MP3 encoder.  You record what your are saying into your computer and then encode it into MP3 format.  From there it’s a matter of generating an RSS feed and submitting your feed to the blog and podcast engines.

Users then use an application like Apple’s Itunes to search out and download podcasts to listen to.  With the growth of portable devices like the Ipod it is no wonder that pocasts are growing in popularity. 

Now there are a few inherent problems with podcasts as they are now, but I expect that many of them will be solved within the next year.

First, the search engines still aren’t able to listen to a podcast and transcribe it.  Therefore, the contents of a podcast are not searchable.  However, as a podcast owner you can tag it with keywords to let the engine know what it’s about.

Second, there are storage limitations to doing your own podcasting.  Because a decent quality podcast file size equates to about a Meg per minute of broadcast you can expect significant storage costs.  In other words a 30 minute podcast will be about 30 Megabytes in size.

Third, podcast adoption is slow.  Most people still haven’t gotten into blogging so to introduce something like podcasting to them might be difficult.  But with tools like the Itunes it will grow as more and more people adopt the technology.

With those things in mind one must decide if podcasting is the way to go as part of their SEO/SEM campaign.

To help you decide let me give you some more stats.

The first people to get into blogging where the “techies.” Chances are, if you are reading this either on the Text Link Brokers website or some other site then you a likely fall into this group.  It is these “techies” who tend to get into these types of things ahead of the rest of the world.  Therefore it is these “techies” who will jump all over podcasting if they already haven’t.

Keeping that in mind, is your target audience in this group?  If not, chances are you many not need to consider podcasting in 2006 until later in the year.  But if your target audience is 24-36 year old males – the same ones who already bought an Xbox 360 (the general techie group) then there’s a good chance that you’ll want to invest some time researching podcasts to see if they are something you can do.

Another consideration is the time required to maintain a podcast.  Much like blogs, they require continual updating with fresh and current content.  You can’t merely publish 2 or 3 podcasts and stop.  You have to commit to doing it long term.

And, as mentioned above, you need to consider your storage space.  You should keep your podcasts archived, just like you’d keep your old blog posts or web pages.  That means you should find a reliable host that can give you a large amount of storage at a reasonable cost.

Also consider yourself.  Do you have that radio voice? Or will your monotone put them to sleep?  If you really want to get into podcasting but don’t feel you are ready for it, perhaps hiring someone to do it would be best for you.

Even if you don’t get into podcasting in the next couple of months I believe its still something you must prepare for.

Remember that search engines are always looking for ways to make information available to the masses.  Therefore they MUST improve on their abilities to automatically index non-text formats (like audio and video files).  And while they’ve made great strides here, there’s still a long way to go. 

But when they do perfect the ability to index audio and transcribe on the fly there will be an entirely new method to reaching prospective customers.  And that’s the goal of any SEO/SEM program isn’t it?  To reach new customers in as many ways as possible?

What I’ve introduced you to here is just the very tip of the iceburg.  There are lots of other considerations which must be made if you are going to get into podcasting.  If this is something that interests you, I’d suggest visiting the Webmaster Radios archives to get an idea of what a podcast is like.  At this site there are lots of SEO/SEM talks going on in the form of podcasts.

Yahoo also has a bunch of great information on their podcasting site to help you better understand what they are and how to get into them.

You will find that podcasting is not as mysterious as you may think and you might also find that you are ready for it.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com