Why do we write metadata for our webpages?

Published by wynn on April 30, 2009

First of all, just to clarify: Metadata is information about information.

How I work with metadata (in publications):

In the library, our metadata files are most like cataloging files – but it’s not the same thing. It’s information that describes the publication/document at hand. It should at least contain the author, date published, subjects and keywords.

We scan documents, run OCR (optical character recognition), and build a PDF file for the document. The metadata is then created in an XML file, and usually import it into the PDF document that it describes. Acrobat also has these nice user-friendly screens to write metadata with, for those not comfortable in writing code. If written in this manner, we can then export in XML if we ever need to.

As for websites, I haven’t written metatags in years.

Metatags had received a bad taste several years back, mostly because nefarious websites would input irrelevant data into their metatags just to gain more clicks/visits. So, your child could be researching for a report on aardvarks and quite innocently click into a site that has absolutely nothing to do with aardvarks, but tons of crap you don’t want your child to see. (At least until the age of 25. Uh – maybe.)

The primary search engine, no matter who wants to deny it, is Google. Google has probably gained this status because they rank pages based on the site’s quality and relevance. So, in that concept, your website about aardvarks probably should plenty of information about the history or the care of the aardvark. It would probably also help to have links to (and from) an aardvark farm, zoo, nature preserve, encyclopedia listings, etc. However, only Google knows how they really rank sites. So what it really boils down to then is the content on the page. If your content is good, well written, and not stuffed/hidden with keywords (like a paragraph of random keywords on the page in the same color as the background), then you will succeed better results with Google.

However, it should be known that writing metadata and metatags is good practice. Just as we title our pages, we should describe our pages as well.

Which is the whole reason metadata was created anyways.

Links of use:

Boagworld: Becoming number One on Google

Here are the W3C guidelines on meta elements

Also, Google does have advice on writing meta elements.

And when all else fails, here’s a generator. Simply submit your URL, and it will return Dublin Core metadata based on your content.