The HTML format allows for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, most commonly keywords and description however it can be expanded to highly-granular information such as the Dublin Core and e-GMS standards.

Metadata is typically hidden from a user when they visit a webpage, however a search engine spider will be able to pick up the metadata. Metadata helps a search engine spider understand what a webpage is about, helps to categorise the webpage, and therefore helps to facilitate search and retrieval (NISO, 2001).

Four Key Reasons Why Metadata Matters

1. Meta data works on image-lead pages
It’s a bit of a cliché but there is some truth in the statement oft-used by search engine optimisation (SEO) experts, that “content is King”. Certainly having a lot of content, that changes and updates regularly is a key criteria in optimising for search engines; however there are many valid situations, web pages and entire websites that are very image-lead. As an example many web designer and artist’ websites would naturally contain a gallery of graphical and image lead work. Ensuring you have detailed meta-data describing the site and page content and the nature of your business ensures that search engines have something to get hold of other than just the image content.

2. Meta data expands on existing content
There is often more than one way to describe something – perhaps there is an incorrect way of describing something or there is a commonly used slang expression. If you want to keep your pages corporate and don’t want to include this alternate content however you’d like to rank in the search engine results page (SERP) for the slang, adding them to your metadata may help you rank well for text which doesn’t actually appear on your on-page content.

3. There’s more than one way to spell
There is sometimes more than one way to spell a particular word, for example English spellings tend to prefer the ‘s’ whereas American spellings prefer ‘z’ (e.g. specialisation vs specialization).

If you want to keep your website consistent, you will want to ensure that you keep your descriptions and spelling conventions consistent throughout all your webpages. However what if you run an international website and you want to rank for the alternative spelling?

Metadata can help by allowing you to add these alternate spellings into your metadata. Effectively this data is hidden from your user when they visit the webpage so there are no consistency issues; however it allows search engine spiders to potentially rank your webpage for a variety of other terms.

4. Good metadata increases click-through rates
Search engines will often use the title and meta descriptions of each webpage when they list the result in the SERP. Pages with good metadata are much more likely to be clicked on than ones with poor metadata for example:

Poor metadata – the title of the page is unhelpful, the description doesn’t say anything about the company.

Better metadata – the title of the page explains what the company does and includes keyword targets, the meta description gives more detail about the company’s services and what’s on the page.

If any of the contents of your metadata match up with the phrase the user has searched for, the keyword terms will be bolded up in the SERP. Research has shown that users are more likely to click on a result the more bolded keywords there are in the listing, thus it is important to plan your metadata carefully and ensure that every page on your website has unique, hand-crafted metadata.

However if you leave your metadata out, it’s not the end of the world – search engines will often try and use some of the on-page content in the SERP if you don’t have a meta description and there are “over 200” factors which influence a web page’s position in the SERP for a given keyphrase (that’s the Google secret sauce) therefore you may still rank well even if you leave this key information out. It does tend to be harder and take a lot longer!

References

Google (nd); Google Basics – Serving results
Available from: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897&ctx=sibling
[cited: 25 August 2009]

NISO (2001); Understanding Metadata
Available from: http://www.niso.org/publications/press/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf
[cited: 25 August 2009]

Wolfram Alpha (the self-titled computational knowledge engine) is officially slated to launch any minute, however they released a debut screencast tonight. Watch this first, pick your jaw back up from the floor then we’ll continue… http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

So what is Google’s cash cow and why is the Wolf a threat? Sponsored Search is by far and away the biggest cash machine in the Google arsenal of products. You know the links at the top of the page on Google, Yahoo! etc? Those links with the shaded background? Yep – they are Sponsored Search ads. Every time you click on one of those ads, the advertiser pays the search engine an amount of money. Such amount is set in a real-time bid ecosystem, taking account of the value of the product I am trying to sell and the amount of competition on the page and other such factors. Here’s how it works.

Comscore reckon that the average UK user searches 24 times a month. 24 x 30MM (UK online) = 720MM total UK searches a month. At over 85% of the search market share that gives Google at least 612MM searches that could potentially make money. Of course not every search has an advert attached to it. Some searches might be too academic or just plain weird to have an advert that is relevant, so let’s say for argument sake that Google shows adverts 60% of the time – that’s a potential of 367.2MM searches on which to show ads. Of course, the sponsored links will not always be clicked in favour of the natural search results, but let’s imagine this happens 15% of the time. 15% of 367.2 is 55.08MM clicks at an educated guess of 15p average = £8.262 MM a month

So how can Wolfram’s computational knowledge engine be a potential threat to this position?

At the moment, search engines allow advertisers to bid on all sorts of keywords that could be reasonably agreed to be relevant. So if my product is a low APR loan, Google will permit me to bid on terms such as low APR loan, cheap loan, low rate loan etc. My ad will only show up if a user searches for those words though. Now; with Wolfram Alpha, those searches that require interpretation or permit greater semantic intention, could be leveraged to serve appropriate and relevant ads to previously unmonetised queries. So that is the potential to hypothetically cover way more searches with a commercial result than Google. Additionally, the more relevant the ad is to the user search intention, the more likely the user is to click on it (click-thru rate). In the Google example above, if we imagine that instead of 15% of people clicking on the sponsored listing, there are 20% instead – then the revenue estimate would be over £11MM a month. Phew!

So anyway – whatever the plan for Wolfram Alpha in terms of commercialising the product, the volumes need to be there in the first place, which can only happen when people see it as a serious alternative to Google. I for one certainly can’t wait to see it live in action, and assess if this really is the future of web search.