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Because the world is flooded with digital information, the need to tag your data cannot be understated. If you do not add some metadata, your work could languish unnoticed – Imagine a document that is stuck in a remote filing cabinet which is in a drawer that is unlabeled and in a folder without a tab. It is as good as lost as far as the outside world is concerned without these bits of metadata. Metadata is data about other pieces of data!But Metadata is not complex – It is simply the word applied to data that allows people to find a page or a product. When you look at the price-tag on something in a shop, it might display the price, the size and the colour - You are looking at some metadata. For a webpage, the data would also be a number of keywords - It is these keywords which are used by the search engines to index and then retrieve pages that are likely to be of interest, just as you might scan the tags on a rail in a clothes shop. Metadata for web pages might include the time and date of creation and the creator, author or institution responsible. Copyright information is also metadata and human readers would be interested in reading this. But not all metadata is visible. At a more technical level, the way the file was created and what device is needed to view the data might be the first items in any HTML. A web page may include metadata specifying what language it is written in or the tools used to create it. This type of metadata is unintelligible to humans but relevant if your browser is to know how to interpret what follows.
<meta name="description" content="describes the page content
using keywords">
If you want to see what metadata looks like on your own webpages, somewhere along the browser menu bar you can see the source code. (Try View>source)
This metadata all lies in the <head> section of any page: The content of the page lies between what are called the <body> tags. Some search engines are clever enough to spot if the metadata in the head is related to the content of the page or not, since people do try to cheat by packing a load of buzz words into their metadata. Google assures me that this action will send you to the back of the cyber queue! Adding your metadataThe blurb which appears on the back cover of a book is a form of metadata as it describes what readers are likely to encounter in the book and reasons why a reader might be interested in buying it. Metadata also acts as a hook to get you to buy the book. The Metadata is inextricably connected to the marketing of any title especially in a world where books are increasingly being bought online. Be aware that people misspell search words. It is possible to include such misspelled versions invisibly inside the metadata so that even these options can be matched by the search engines. If you have a name with several spellings and misspellings, put the variants into your metadata so folk will find you. The advent of ebooks takes metadata to a new level since not only the book itself but some items within the book can have metadata attached to them. Image metadataOne important example is the metadata which is attached to images. Each picture is able to have a long and a short description attached to it. A short description is occasionally seen on a webpage before the image arrives and this was important when the internet was slow. The long description is used by the search engines for people who are hunting for images and so this provides another way to bring people to look at your work. Without wanting to labour the point, failing to ensure that the proper metadata is attached to your book is like printing a book with a blank cover. If you want the many web engines to be able to check if your book is what they are looking for, you must put some metadata on the webpage. |
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