Metadata is data about data, and is essential to any successful content strategy. It is important for SEO, user experience, and content stewardship. Metadata can help search engines find your content. It can help users find the information they are looking for. And it can help you to manage your content more effectively. Without good metadata, it’s difficult to even understand what content you have, let alone maximize its long-term benefit to your organization.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a library scientist to understand and use metadata effectively. This post provides the essentials you need to get started.
Types of metadata
Let's start with definitions. There are basically four types of metadata relevant to content strategy:
Descriptive metadata: Properties such as title, author and subject, which describe the document or other content item.
Structural metadata: Parts of a document, such as the introduction, chapters, and conclusion.
Administrative metadata: Information like owner and update schedule that helps guide how the content should be managed.
Technical metadata: Details like file type and size describing the file that contains the content.
Mapping it out
One of the best ways to organize and understand your metadata is to use a concept called a schema. A schema is basically a map to, or set of rules governing, your metadata. Whether you know it or not, your organization most likely has at least parts of a schema already set up. For example, your website information architecture is likely structured by subject, and you can use the subjects as the roots of your keyword or descriptive metadata. If you have an internal style guide, it may include a list of preferred subject terms, also known as a controlled vocabulary. If you have a content calendar, that gives you administrative metadata about when documents need to be updated or replaced.
You may also want to assign structural metadata terms, in order to describe the genre or type of document or digital object. This could allow your users to select among presentations, handouts, pamphlets, books, keynote speeches, etc.
If you don’t have one already, you may want to create a content matrix document that lists all of your organization’s content, your controlled vocabulary/keywords, and all the related metadata. This means that at a glance you can see who is responsible for content, when it needs to be updated, and how much content you have about a particular topic. The content matrix is especially useful as it provides a way to group and sort metadata according to categories and functions.
Tip: Some metadata can easily be extracted from your publication system, such as posting date and file type.
It’s ok to start small
The minimum metadata you should have for your content is the title, keyword, creator, date created, date posted, date for review or replacement, and URL or other location. You can add additional fields such as audience, price, language, and subject-matter experts who contributed, whatever will help you manage the content efficiently. Or if you’re looking for more formal structure and greater scalability, you may want to structure your metadata according to well established standards such as Dublin Core or MODS. These metadata schemas are also good sources of ideas for metadata categories that you may find useful.
If you don’t already have a full list of descriptive keywords for your documents, you can use a card sorting tool, like this one Tizra created for its site planning workshop. Start with as many keywords and alternate terms as you can think of, and add blank cards for participants to add their own. Ask participants to group by keyword categories, creating lists of broader terms, narrower terms, and related terms. For example, in a veterinary context, you might have farm animals and pets as the top terms, and then under pets, have dogs, cats, rabbits, and birds as narrower terms. For dogs, you might pick “dog” as the primary subject term, but use “canines” as a related term in tagging. This means that whether somebody types in “canines” or “dogs” as the search term, they will get the results about dogs, the same way that they can use “dog” as one of the filters. Try to think about the different ways your users will try to access material. In the veterinary context, users may also be interested in filtering by the age of the animal, or by interactions like grooming or allergies.
Subject terms versus tags
Keywords are structured and fairly formal, but tagging can be informal. For example, your association might use “alternative and complementary medicine” as the primary keyword, but tag documents with “alternative medicine” or “alternative therapies.”
Keys to effective keywords
In most cases, coming up with a structure of topical keywords that’s well understood by your audience and helps divide information into manageable chunks is one of the most important tasks in developing your schema. Remember…
Use the keywords your audience knows and understands best.
Use consistent terminology and avoid duplication in your keywords.
Update your metadata, especially your keywords, regularly.
Select keywords that are neither too general nor too specific (i.e., could be applied to almost any resource, or to only a handful of things).
Metadata and SEO
Discoverability through Google and similar search engines is one of the most widely used arguments for good metadata. The right metadata in the right place can make the difference between being in the top results and being on the second page.
Tizra puts the metadata that you enter in the right part of the webpage code automatically, but you have the insight into your audiences and how they think of and search for content. Our website can help you fill in any gaps and keep up to date.
Make a regular habit of looking at your website search analytics to see what terms your audience uses and if they change over time. If they use terms that you don’t already include in your metadata, that’s an indicator that you need to expand your metadata. To go back to our example of alternative and complementary medicine, if your members also search for “herbal medicine,” that can be a useful term to add to your metadata schema, use as a tag, or add to your content.
Be sure, though, not to overload your tagging with any terms that aren’t directly related to the content. Even if you do it to increase findability, Google sometimes penalizes websites that it thinks are stuffing irrelevant keywords onto a page.
Conclusion and next steps
Good metadata doesn’t just help your content find its audience, it also helps your organization connect more meaningfully with its constituents. It’s an investment that can pay off significantly in expanded reach, improved member experience and engagement, and of course increased sales and organizational growth.
We hope this introduction inspires and informs your journey toward better metadata. If you’re looking for more ways to maximize the value of your content, please contact Tizra. We’re here to help!