Metadata – one of the loudest, sexiest buzzwords in web development, design, and search engine optimization. Yet strangely enough every explanation of it is either overly academic or too technical. Here’s what you’ve probably heard:
Q: What is metadata and why should I care?
A: Metadata is data used to describe data.
Thanks, I totally get it!?…..Yes?….No?….Maybe? Ok, Ok…. enough kidding around. Let’s break down metadata and why it’s important.
Yes, you read right: metadata is data used to describe data. But don’t let the circular logic scare you off. You need, at the very least, an elementary explanation of metadata, otherwise your great online content is only performing at 50 percent efficiency, at best.
There are different types of metadata – I’ll be discussing three metadata entities in order of robustness (or human affectation) using an everyday example – downloading and cataloging music.
Structural Metadata: allows your computer’s music manager to automatically arrange your bands alphabetically, categorize the band’s newest album by genre and release date, list album tracks in sequential order and more. Additionally, your music’s structural metadata is what allows your music manager to create random playlists, as well as customize your view and how you choose to arrange your music to suit your own personal preferences.
Administrative Metadata: informs your music manager as to which file type is assigned to the structure of your song/album. Simply put, this is the reason why only certain music managers will play certain types of music files. For example, songs downloaded from the iTunes store are administered with file types only playable through iTunes.
Descriptive Metadata: If you rate a song file in iTunes –say you give it 5 stars – the music manager is then able to subsequently categorize your “favorites”, and provide additional suggestions that you might like to purchase based on your rating history.
So what does all this have to do with web development?? Here we go….
Notice that of the three forms, descriptive metadata is the only form that manipulates based on the user, and the only one that lends itself to personalization or human affectation. As site owners, we have no control over how different search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing – process structural and administrative metadata, but we can effectively and strategically use descriptive metadata to give meaning to site’s content/data so that is relevant for visitors. Remember, descriptive metadata describes content at the concept level.
So can you see how the use of metadata for music could be applied to web design, especially E-Commerce? Careful attention must be paid to metadata title tags, image tags, product descriptors and more to facilitate searching and SEO. Using metadata can be the difference between having a great looking site that falls to the bottom of the search engine, and one that gets the top ranking and is consistently explored and shared.
Aside from design considerations, meta data refers to the 3 main tags in the source code.
these are title description and keywords
Information in these tags should be about the page they are on, and not used as a sales pitch.
“Information about information” simply means that the information in the tags refers to the content in the page.
The weight of the words in a tag is determined by the amount of words and their position in the string.
This can be altered by using a pipe ( | ), between 2 phrases.
Doing this makes the phrases on either side of the pipe carry the same weight.
When designing these tags, one should be aware of how people read, and how they judge relevance. Shorter IS better.
Hey Reg, Thanks for your fantastic comments. True, there are three primary tags in the source code for each page (and so many others), but keyword meta tags no longer count toward the keyword density of a site’s SEO. Page Title and Meta Description are two of the most heavily weighted tags. Plus, they are what a prospective visitors sees in the SERPs before deciding whether or not to click on your website. So long as you stay within the character counts and use targeted, relevant terms, meta data can help both web crawlers and humans understand what a website is about and how relevant it is to the initial search. Cheers!