While podcasting is not new, it does appear to have seen somewhat of a resurrection over the past couple of years. Podcasts can range from the educational to entertaining and everything in between. Some of the obvious promotional benefits of podcasting like greater exposure through alternative online mediums is somewhat obvious. But, rarely do people speak of the link building and SEO benefits of establishing and regularly contributing to your own podcast.
Dofollow Backlinks
Perhaps one of the most immediate, ancillary but massive benefits of establishing your own podcast is the ability to consistently acquire dofollow backlinks. While many podcasting hosts mark outbound links with the not-so-beneficial “nofollow” tag, there are quite a few that allow dofollow outbound posts from each episode you might create.
These dofollow SEO podcast links which can be tied directly to the root domain (not just the subdomain) of a particular podcasting website, are often posted on sites with extremely high Domain Authority (DA). Couple the domain authority with the dofollow links and you have a winning combination for moving your own promoted content higher in the search engines.
Syndication
Podcast syndication is probably one of the more common and most oft used features that allows cross promotion of a podcast between various podcast hosting companies. Sites like Libsyn (which incidentally stands for Liberated Syndication) allow users to publish content on-site, but then syndicate that content out among dozens of other. Here are some examples of the sites Libsyn will syndicate content to:
- Podbean
- Castplayer
- Spotify
- iTunes
- iHeartRadio
- Pandora
- dozens more…
Keep in mind, in most cases, you will need to apply to be included as a syndicated feed into the other sites, but the benefits can be massive. Think about your ability to grow a backlink base in this way:
- You create a podcast episode that has one or two strategic dofollow backlinks back to your site.
- Said episode is then syndicated to a dozen or more other sites with high authority.
- These sites contain the same links with several of them being dofollow, giving you additional boost for your own site’s SEO.
- As you continue this march forward, a single podcast could mean you benefit by procuring a handful of links.
- As you repeat this process week-over-week and month-over-month, your backlink profile’s growth (and your overall search exposure) will reflect the efforts of your input.
As you look for non-spammy ways to build legitimate backlinks to your website, look no further than the world of podcasting, understanding that–like blogging–podcasting represents a labor of love and consistency. It takes time to build out a backlink profile using this as one of several avenues of distribution for your links, but it can pay off massively as you work at it over time.