As a content marketer, you might be more of a writer-who-spends-spare-cash-on-new-releases-creative-type than a spend-your-free-time-writing-code-in-the-basement-type, and that’s okay. Content marketers are like the for Content ice cream flavors to a web developer’s ice cream maker. But there’s an odd little thing located at the cross-section of web developing and content marketing, and it’s called metadata.
You don’t have to know HTML code, be a cyprus phone number data web developer, or even a computer geek to understand and use metadata, and this is great news because, as a content marketer, you should be aware of metadata and strive to incorporate it into your content marketing SEO strategy.
Let’s Begin with the Basics: What Is Metadata?
With its similarity to metaphysics, it’s only natural for the word “metadata” to conjure up panicky flashbacks of trying to meet the tall order of reading and understanding Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and others in that introductory philosophy the 10 steps to successful problem solving in your call center course you had to take freshman year of college.
Stop worrying! Put those finals-related-flashback-jitters on hold. Take a deep breath and relax because metadata is not nearly as complicated!
Instead of attempting to describe the nature of reality (which is what metaphysics does), metadata should attempt to describe the nature of your content.
Metadata Defined
Yes, at first glance, the term metadata is a little frightening. It comes from two root words: meta, an adjective that means self-referential and data, a noun that refers to collected facts and statistics. Together the two root words make for Content metadata, which according to Merriam-Webster is “data that provides information about other data.”
I know the concept still seems complicated, but bear with me, and you’ll soon see it’s not so bad.
Metadata Explained
In terms of content marketing, the dictionary’s definition belgium numbers of metadata is only slightly helpful. Before you can put metadata to work for your content marketing SEO strategy, you need to understand what it really is.
So, what is metadata in terms of content marketing?
Basically, metadata refers to the information about your web content that’s provided by a variety of meta tags. These meta tags are included within the HTML of each page of content on your website. They are not visible on your webpage to average web surfers, but web crawlers and search engines use them to find, identify, categorize, rank, and display search results. Meta tags show search engines how to display your website’s title and description in search results. Google even uses metadata to populate its coveted featured snippet search results.
Metadata provides a set of instructions to web crawlers, and these instructions tell them how to deal with your web pages. Metadata will also help you and the search engines organize all your content.
What Does Metadata Do?
Imagine a library with no alphabetization and no Dewy Decimal System. It’s messy, right? You probably wouldn’t be able to find anything.
Metadata is like a card catalog (remember those?) for digital content. It helps search engines and it helps your website. In addition to for Content identifying page titles and descriptions, metadata creates an organizational system. Specifically, metadata generates a taxonomy (Uh-oh, not another million-dollar-word!) within your content. This is just a fancy way of saying that metadata helps to create a hierarchical organizational scheme (That sounds fancy, too.) to identify, sort, and organize web content.
Like the Dewey Decimal System organizes library materials into categories (biography, social science, natural science, philosophy, literature, and arts), metadata can help you organize your web content into the categories that work for you.
Without metadata, every bit of content on your site would be unidentifiable, unfindable, unrelatable, and completely disorganized. In a world with no meta tags, Amazon would be like a basement in a house where you lived for 50 years and never threw away (or donated #sustainability) anything. You wouldn’t be able to find the things you were looking for, and you would be swamped in stuff you didn’t need. On an Amazon without metadata, you would have to wade through millions of pages of junk, tech gadgets, tools, furniture, beauty products, and snacks before you found the dog bed you wanted to order.
Meta tags make it possible for websites like Amazon (and your site) to organize content into nifty, intuitive, easy-to-search categories. Meta tags are the reason why you can shop for a pair of shoes on Amazon in a category for apparel and then narrow the results with filters for size, color, brand, materials, and other features.
Metadata can also connect separate bits of content on your website, identifying them as related. This is how Amazon is able to offer up a variety of suggestions for similar sneakers to the ones you’ve demonstrated interest in, compare their features, and direct you to the items people like you have ultimately ended up purchasing.
I know, I know. You’re not Amazon. (Unless you are, and in that case, hello Jeff Bezos. Thank you for reading.) So, what can metadata do for Contentv for all the non-Amazon websites of the world wide web?
In addition to increasing organization, it can improve your SEO.
How Does Metadata Impact Content Marketing SEO?
Metadata will increase the findability of your website and the relevance of all the content it contains – whether you’re selling shoes, dog beds, or services or distributing decorating tips, recipes, and good ideas. Increased findability and simplified searchability are precisely why metadata is a crucial component of search engine optimization.
As stated above, metadata also improves content organization. A well-organized site isn’t just important for e-commerce. It’s essential to all online content. Your impeccable organization will improve the user experience on your site, making it easier to navigate and more valuable to your audience. With a perfectly designed system of meta tags, you can quickly categorize your blog posts, video content, event announcements, press mentions, social media, and more.