Metadata

What is it? What does it do? How does Coughlin use it? Should I be using it? How can I use it?

What is it?

Metadata literally means “information about information.” In the context of your website and blog articles, it’s information about the information that you’re providing. It’s a way of categorizing information and identifying related information. Most people never see any of the metadata; it’s invisible to the front end of your website. It is there for the inner workings of your website and the internet at large, to make the mechanics of retrieving and displaying information more efficient, accurate, and relevant.

What does it do?

Most importantly to you, metadata is what makes search engines like Google really tick. When a search engine looks for websites to display in search results, it looks far beyond the surface. For example, your website might have a bunch of great images, but Google isn’t going to know exactly what they are. However, words can be attached to images in order to help identify them. Google will look at those words in order to determine if an image is relevant to a search query.

There are places in the code behind your website for metadata all over the place.Every page itself carries a place in its code for hidden words and phrases which help categorize that page and tell search engines what kind of information is on the page.

One of the most common examples of metadata is tagging. Tags are brief lists of words and phrases that can be added to many types of content, and help categorize and identify that content. Joomla articles, for example, have tagging built into them. Tagging can be useful beyond SEO, and drive powerful filtering features for content.

How does Coughlin use it?

We think it’s necessary to provide a good foundation of SEO on every website we build. Given metadata’s importance to SEO, we include meta tags on every website we build.