Data about data, that's meta

Data about data, well I guess you could say that’s quite meta…oh wait that already exists, and is aptly named metadata. In terms of the World Wide Web, metadata refers to the data about the webpages that are presented to a user, however this data is often never seen by the user.

In an age where everyone wants people to be able to access the information that they are trying to share with the world, metadata is one of the most important factors to consider. Whilst this data is never seen by the user, it is seen by the bots that crawl your webpage, the browser that displays the page and the search engines used to find your content.

Using metadata will make your website more accessible as search engines will have greater knowledge about the site such as, who created the site, what content can be found on the site and other information relating to the site that users may be searching for.

Metadata can be implemented on HTML sites through the use of the tag. Using this tag a developer can edit the various attributes of the metadata such as who the author is, the description of the website and various other attributes related to the metadata. Thus if a user were to search for a certain author name, websites containing that author’s name in the metadata would be displayed.

Metadata is a useful tool for describing what data is being presented.