Metadata is one of the most misunderstood aspects of content management and website design. Editors and writers tend to look at it as a technical issue. Technical people look for a software solution. Both are wrong.

Metadata is a fundamental skill that web writers and editors must acquire.

Metadata is the who, what, where, when and how, of your content. It is that 30 second elevator description. Metadata may include: heading/title, summary/description, author name, date of publication, geographic classification, subject classification, keywords.

Metadata gives your content context. Content that does not have effective metadata is not web content. It is sloppy, next-to-useless print content that has been unprofessionally published on the web. If you don't have time to publish professional metadata for your content, you shouldn't be allowed to publish on a website.

This may well be the difference between web content that succeeds or fails. You quite simply cannot call yourself a web writer unless you can write quality metadata. Anyway, much of what is called metadata, you do already (headings, summaries, etc.). You just don't call it metadata.

Metadata is what scan readers want. Within a matter of seconds, people scan a page to see if it's right for them.

Scan readers love metadata. It quickly gives them context. It helps them make the decision whether to read on or hit the Back button. If you don't have good metadata, lots more people will be hitting the Back button.

Whenever I hear technical people talk about a software solution to metadata, I want to scream. (Well, get annoyed.) Technical people can be absolutely brilliant when it comes to technical things. But like writers not having a clue about computers, techies very often don't have a clue about content.

The problem is that many techies think they understand content. That's when it gets dangerous.

Some techies look at content and see a big pile of words. The objective is to put metadata on this pile of words as quickly and cheaply as possible using clever software. If you want a quality result, this is definitely not how to do it. If you want a cheap and nasty result that is often worse than useless, sure, take this approach.

Good web writers take responsibility for their metadata. Creating great metadata for your content begins with understanding who your reader is.

Your classification (taxonomy) metadata is the foundation of your website. Classification is to strategy as poetry is to prose: it is the ultimate distillation of what you do. Within seconds, people will scan your classification and get an impression of who you are and what you do.

Classification design can be a complicated process. Here are a few high-level issues:

When dealing with a particular type of content - such as events, general articles, etc. - a unique set of metadata will need to be developed. Here are some things to keep mind: