Recently, we explained what makes up SEO-optimized texts and what needs to be paid attention to in creating this content. But after these entries are published on your site, it’s important not to lose track of them when time passes. While a ranking is kept up by users visiting your website, there are actually other factors that play a role in this as well. These are worth talking about in this post in order to guarantee a long-lasting, search engine optimized website for ourselves and for you. In order for this, it is important to maintain and update your metadata from time to time.
What is metadata?
Metadata is structured data that is made up of information about other data. The word “structured” stems from computer science, or more specifically software engineering, and is the term used to describe the data structure of an object used to save and organize data. It is considered a structure because the data is connected in a certain order that exists to make accessing and managing the data more efficient. This can be compared with the structure of a book. A book is not composed only of written text. Along with the story, there is additional basic information available, such as the title, author, book cover text, and ISBN. In order that this book can be entered into a database, such as a library, it needs this basic metadata so it can be sorted correctly.
Metadata is one of the basics of SEO and consists mostly of documents and databases, or data and books. It’s often not just the files themselves that are stored, but also their characteristics. This also means that people’s names are sometimes collected too, for example. Sensitive data can thus be easily used for criminal intent. But, it can be used much better for search engine optimization. This digital data can be stored in a data format standard such as EXIF or Dublin Core.Â
Metadata makes life easy
Creating structured data lends your website to considerably easier analysis and a higher ranking of the site by the search engine algorithms. People searching for a specific term via a search engine initially see only the metadata: title, URL, and the snippet (an overview of the listed website). Thus, at this moment, the decision to visit a website will be made based solely on this information. This means that special care should be taken to make sure that this data is kept up to date. Metadata cannot be created for texts, however. Images and videos have so-called alternative (“alt”) text available to them, which the search engines read and integrate into their ranking criteria.
Metadata stores relevant information
Metadata is not directly connected to the main data that is shown to the user. This data can be viewed in its own external document, however. It can also be cached in search engines. This happens when we search for a store and the results of this search are shown locally on Google Maps in order to review the visit. This shows that metadata is also often used for marketing purposes. The analysis of this data also shows that a lot of information can be gathered about a person: which preferences, habits, and lifestyle does a particular person have? In a sense, a digital fingerprint of this person is taken, which could contain information on websites visited, duration and actual times spent on a site, location, and much more.
Optimization and upkeep of metadata
It’s important to know which parts of the metadata are relevant in order to optimize them. In addition to the information stored as HTML under the meta descriptions, the title, URL, headings, and so-called snippets are the most important meta tags. Snippets are one of the most important indicators for search engine optimization since they are the first item to arouse interest in the reader. Lots of creativity and attention need to be invested in these, since the user will only click on the link to the site and spend time on it if their expectations have been fulfilled.
Properly-formulated meta tags are the poster child for a good, trustworthy internet site. Efforts must be made to ensure a meticulous and proper creation of meta descriptions. This doesn’t take a lot of time –Â they should contain the most important information on your website in a maximum of only 155 characters (including spaces). In addition, they should contain the main keyword as well as sub keywords, since these convey the main message of your site. If you do not create them, the search engine in use will create them on its own using information from the website. However, these are often choppy and incoherent, making it more unlikely for a user to decide to click on that site’s link, which will lower your ranking.
So the same can be said here as for the previous post (Groundwork is annoying but helps!) – you can kill two birds with one stone. By doing maintenance on your metadata, visitors are happy and potential customers will be made aware of your site. The click rate then goes up, driving up the site’s ranking as well.
Avoid making mistakes
Before we wrap this up, we definitely need to once again make clear which mistakes cannot be made and must be corrected in existing metadata. You need to make sure not to use an excess of characters. Good punctuation should be used. And finally, absolutely NO keyword stuffing should be done! Main keywords always belong at the beginning of the page. They should ideally be put right in the headings so it’s clear to every visitor what the website is about. So… what are we waiting for? Off we go!
