Here’s a question we get all the time — “What is metadata, exactly?” The answer is surprisingly intuitive. By definition, metadata is not something that you will find on the frontend of a website. A good way to think of metadata is as “data about data,” hidden information that organizes, summarizes and contextualizes the content of a given webpage. A website’s metadata is commonly likened to an invisible library catalog that provides a brief and structured synopsis of a book: one column has the author name, another has a one-liner about the plot, another has the genre of the work, etc.

But remember, just because you can’t see a site’s metadata, at least directly, doesn’t mean it isn’t important! Search engines care about your site’s metadata a whole lot, and your ranking for relevant search terms is determined to a great degree by how consistent your metadata really is. As an experiment, go to a website that you visit often and view the source of the page. (To view the page source, go to the “View” menu option in your browser and select “page source”, or else just press control+U simultaneously.) You’ll most likely see at the very top of the page a list of meta tags containing information about the site: “content type”, “author”, “robots” and others.

Now, as a student of SEO, there are three main meta properties that you should worry about, namely, keywords, page description and page title. You already have the heads up on keywords (see our Key to Keyword Research), but what about the page description and page title? Well, these meta tags are about as straightforward as they sound. For the page description, you should provide a sentence or two that give a very general summary of your company services and/or a short account of the content of the specific page. Try to keep your page descriptions to less than 70 characters — more characters and your description will get caught off by the search engines, potentially leaving out important keywords. The page title should be even shorter — just a handful of words, a kind of textual banner ad for the page. Some good examples might be “basketball camp in new york”, “space age toaster ovens”, “best wine in county x”…. Finally, make sure each of your webpages contains a consistent amount of metadata. Your visitors won’t see the metadata, but you will see the difference once your website starts shooting up the search engine rankings.