The Value of Meta Data

Recently, I was presenting an SEO strategy to a client and the discussion of Meta data came up. The use of Meta data is very relevant for corporate websites since meta data can tell you a great deal about the page content. A good example is where you can tell the history and origin of the content. When I was a Web Strategist for IBM’s Information Management team the we were required to include meta data stating the person responsible for the the page, who was the author, date created, and the date the page should be reviewed (often within and 18 month window). This information was instrumental in preventing pages for becoming orphaned after a certain length of time and providing a responsible party to review the page to determine if it still needed to be live or updated.

Sample code:

<meta content=”Salman Mustaquim/Endicott/IBM” name=”owner”/>
<meta scheme=”W3CDTF” name=”IBM.Effective” content=”2008-11-25″/>

You can see from the code that there is an owner and the effective date of the content.

There are many other types of information that can be stored in the meta data including:

1. Content type
2. Products and categories
3. Publishing system/team
4. Taxonomy
5. Security level
6. More than I can name

Here are some links to articles on meta data:
http://searchenginewatch.com/2167931
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html

Tagged as: HTML, LinkedIn, Meta data, Web marketing