Episode metadata

What is metadata ?

Metadata are all the descriptions, images and details around your audio content. For example, every provider, channel and episode has it's own title and description fields that can be used to describe the contents of your audio.

Why is this important ?

Users want to know what the audio content is about before they will listen or download it. Sometimes even with channels that are known to them they might be looking for specific people or topics that they want to listen to. If they can't find what they are looking for, they will likely leave without listening to anything!

Additionally, all titles and descriptions supplied by you becomes accessible to our search engine - any user searching our site for something could become a listener if your metadata covers the topic they are looking for. This is a great way to expose your content to users who may never have heard about you before.

Finally, all our content metadata gets exposed via SEO friendly tags so that people searching for your topic on Google or other search engine might find it.

What is good metadata ?

Our team will help you with your provider and channel metadata during the setup process, but when you publish your episodes you need to fill in metadata for each episode.

For every episode you can provide a title (a short overview of the contents) and a longer description that covers the more detail.

As mentioned, good episode titles and descriptions are vital to the success of your content, and it’s your chance to “sell” your content. Try make them sound interesting and engaging to end-users.

We recommend having the following for all episodes:

• The name of the presenter(s)

This is important, don’t assume users know who the presenter is, often users browsing the site come across content for the first time as an interesting topic catches their attention.

• The names of anyone interviewed

Naming the person being interviewed is important not only to provide additional context to the topic, but one of the most frequent searches on our site and from external search engines is on the name of the person.

• The topic of discussion or highlights of the content

Providing the topic is absolutely key to getting good user engagement with your audio. This works great for almost any discussion or interview style content. News content could perhaps highlight 2 or 3 key items from the bulletin.

• Tone of the content

Is it a hard hitting interview that tackles issues, a humorous feature or thought provoking piece? Let the user know what to expect.

Should I add the date/time to the title ?

No, we recommend you use the provided date/time selection functionality when you create your episode.

Date and times are already displayed next to your episodes on our site, so having it in the title will be redundant.

Additionally the value from the date/time box is not only used for display, but allows us to better index your content, search for things between specific times and calculate update frequency - all things we can't do from values entered as the title or description.