Improve Results With Tags
Modernize your website with clever tags to improve the sharing and social experience for your users. The look & feel of your Podopi podcast is sure to dazzle everyone, as an added bonus!This guide is written primarily for people with a technical background, who understands the basics behind HTML and web development.
Podopi’s readability engine parses your website for information. This includes, but is not limited to: article title, publish date, author, description, logo, share image and article body text. It is clever enough to find this information by iteself in most situations, but can require a bit of help on complex websites.
How Podopi Gets the Information
Podopi uses tags of various kinds, and with different priorities, to find relevant information on blogs and websites. Modify or add the tags to your website to enable better parsing and improve your Podcast’s visual appearance and overall performance.
Listed below are examples for all the tag types used (scroll down to the next section for a full list of tags and priorities):
- Meta
<meta property="author" content="Neil Breen" />
- Open Graph
<meta property="og:title" content="Hello world" />
- Twitter
<meta name="twitter:description" content="My first post!" />
- Link
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="https://example.com/logo.png">
- HTML head-tag
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello world</title>
</head>
</html> - Structured data — see Understand how structured data works for more information.
<html>
<head>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Neil Breen"
},
"datePublished": "2021-07-01",
"description": "My first post!"
}
</script>
</head>
</html>
Tags & Priorities
The readability engine allows for several ways to annotate the same information in HTML markup. Websites are usually made by humans, and humans are different. There are many standards to adhere to out there, and Podopi does its best to understand and prioritize among them.
The following subsections outline how Podopi gets the information and in which order, in terms of priority (most important listed first):
Basic Information
Basic information is fetched by requesting the article, parsing the HTML and looking at tags.
| Information | How Podopi finds it |
|---|---|
| Language |
|
| Title |
|
| Description |
|
| Author |
|
| Publish date |
|
Images
Images are requested and downloaded together with the basic information.
| Image | How Podopi finds it |
|---|---|
| Podcast cover image |
|
| Episode cover image |
|
Article Body Text
Article body refers to the full-text content of your blog posts or articles. Podopi provides two ways to discover your article body. Select the one that works the best on your website.
From the Feed
Podopi use RSS feeds to fetch your recent content. There are several versions of the RSS standard. Some standards allow the inclusion of the article body within feed items. Then Podopi won’t have to visit your website to get the content. Enable this feature in the feed settings. If your feed include the full article, this option usually provides the best results.
Readability Engine
The readability engine is a machine that acts like a human. It will browse to your website and parse the content. It’s clever, but because it’s a machine it can sometimes get confused. Especially on websites with complex layouts made up of deep layers of nested HTML markup. 90-95% of all websites work perfectly.
To get a feel of what Podopi “sees”, try activating the readability feature in your web browser. Once activated on your site, you should see the full article body in a layout optimized for reading. If not, Podopi’s readability engine will most likely also struggle with your site. Simplify your HTML output as much as possible. Make your website accessible, use the tags outlined above, and Podopi will find the relevant data.
Feel free to reach out if you encounter any issues.
