Metadata

Overview

Metadata refers to the set of data that describes and gives information about other data. In the context of digital marketing, metadata becomes an essential tool to understand and optimize the performance of websites, digital campaigns, and online content.

Metadata helps provide context to data, making it easier to organize, locate, and understand. This can include everything from data about webpage content and authorship, to information about images, videos, and other multimedia elements. As such, they play a significant role in SEO, user experience, and web content management.

Usage Types

SEO Metadata

SEO Metadata are elements embedded in a web page's code that help search engines understand the page's content. They do not appear on the page itself, but can be found within the page's source code. Examples include:

• Title tags - Short descriptors of a webpage's content, displayed in search engine results.
• Meta descriptions - Brief summaries of a webpage's content, also displayed in search engine results.
• Meta keywords - Used to be a factor in SEO, but as of 2021, most search engines no longer use them due to overuse and keyword stuffing.

Social Media Metadata

Social Media Metadata are used by social media platforms to determine how links shared on their platforms are displayed. They include:

• Open Graph tags - These are used by social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to decide how to display shared links.
• Twitter cards - Similar to Open Graph tags, but specifically for Twitter.

Structured Data

Structured Data refers to any data that is organized in a way that it's searchable by search engines, displayed in a creative way in SERPs. It includes:

• Schema markup - It's a code you put on your website to help the search engines provide more informative results to users.

Other Types

• Geo-Metadata - Information about the geographical location related to the data.
• Multimedia Metadata - Information related to multimedia elements like images, videos, audio files, etc.