The itunes:keywords tag is a very important piece of meta data contained in your podcast feed. From my experience this tag greatly impacts the exposure your podcast gets in iTunes Music Store searches. But I recently discovered an interesting limitation (more on that in a second).
The itunes:keywords field contains a list of keywords (single words not phrases) that describe your content. This is used by the iTunes Music Store to return search results for phrases using those words.
In the past I’ve filled this tag with as many words as seemed relevant. But it looks like their is a limit to using the tag. Doug Smith, president of Podango, brought the following passage from the iTunes podcasting tech spec to my attention:
This tag allows users to search on a maximum of 12 text keywords. Use commas to separate keywords.
Notice that they say “maximum of 12 text keywords”. Apparently there is a limit to how many words you can use. I’m not sure how strictly this is enforced. There must not be a penalty for having too many words because my podcasts are doing fine when it comes to search exposure in iTunes. Maybe they just ignore any words after the first 12.
Review your itunes:keywords tags and see if a few words should be cut out. Or at the very least reorder them so that the most important 12 come first. If you’re not using the iTunes podcasting tags in your feed at all, start now.
The easiest way to add the iTunes tags to your podcasting feed is to use FeedBurner’s Smartcast feature. This appears under the Optimize tab in your account.
Has anyone had any other observations concerning the use of the itunes:keywords tag?
January 28th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I have a question for you. Should you limit the amount of technorati tags you have? Is there a point where they become less effective, say if you have too many or if the keywords you use are a bit of a stretch compared to what you wrote in your post? Might I suggest a post or series on the effective use of technorati tags?
Thanks,
Sterling
January 28th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Sterling,
That’s a good question. I’ll put that in the queue to do a post on the subject of Technorati tags.