Last month we examined the importance of the words which you use on your website.  This month we examine the related discipline of content classification and meta data.  Please read on, it’s not as irrelevant or onerous as it sounds…

Imagine a city with no signposts, no taxis, no buses and no cars.  The city is full of buildings, some beautiful and full of information, commerce and business, others less beautiful and less useful.  The tourist map handed out to people visiting the city only covers 18% of its buildings and attractions.  The only way tourists can find buildings not on the map is by word of mouth, or by fluke.  City planners are investing millions in their buildings, but haven’t thought about how people can find them or use them.  The reason?  Self indulgence and lack of thought for the visitor on behalf of those building.

Sound crazy?  It is crazy but it is a picture of the world wide web today.

Today the best search engines have only indexed 18% of all of the world’s websites.  Many of the sites indexed by search engines are indexed under categories or search words that the website owners never considered relevant.  Many sites which are fortunate enough to be indexed are indexed with search words which many users will never use.  Today people building websites are investing thousands in putting their sites together and haven’t given enough thought about how people can find or use them.  The reason?  Self indulgent marketing and limited consideration given to what users want.

Why is this the case?  Because the web has no city planners to keep its buildings in order, the only regulation in place is self regulation.  And even 10 years on since the invention of the web, with the research carried out and the theory book written, organisations are failing to recognise the importance of thinking on their clients’ terms, carrying out information classification and writing appropriate meta data.

Perhaps few people care about meta data because you can’t actually see it.  When you attach meta data to each of the pages on your website it doesn’t affect how the page looks, and in our image obsessed world, sometimes the temptation is to think that’s OK.  But it’s not.

Meta data is what gives your content context.  It is what allows online visitors to work out what Kipling calls his six honest serving men – what, why, when, how, where and who of your content.  It takes your content written from your perspective and makes it available, searchable and understandable to those who wish to learn from your content but from their own perspective.  It typically consists of heading/title, summary/description, author name, date of publication, geographic classification, subject classification and keywords and is stored invisibly within your web page.

Meta data is not a technical challenge, although it is a technical sounding term.  It is relevant to everyone who is authoring content for the web.  Whilst there are programs available to auto generate it, that’s not the solution.  Meta data must be written by humans to be understood by humans.

If your content has context, there will be two immediate and important consequences.

Firstly search engines will understand more of what your site is about, and therefore list it more highly and more appropriately.  They understand meta information perhaps more than any other because their whole purpose is to summarise and get users where they want to go.

The second reason why meta data is so important is because of the way people read on the web.  People scan read, they jump from one topic to another, impatiently they flit until they find what they are looking for.  You don’t have a lot of time to attract their attention, and probably have fewer than 50 words to convince them.

There is no silver bullet or magic software to author meta data.  In the same way as a print author will pour over their work to check layout and style, so the best web authors will additionally commit to writing brilliant meta data to help their site visitors find their way around the city.