On a few occasions when discussing search engine optimization with clients I've mentioned the fact that I think page title and page heading are metadata. "Metadata being what?" is typically the response I get. Then I try to define metadata without using the word "data." Try it...it's hard. When I read this quote today I realized I had been approaching the description from the wrong angle:

On the general concept of metadata, Steve Yegge: "Metadata is any kind of description or model of something else. The comments in your code are just a a natural-language description of the computation. What makes metadata meta-data is that it's not strictly necessary. If I have a dog with some pedigree paperwork, and I lose the paperwork, I still have a perfectly valid dog."

Woof!

Quote of the Month

 

Additional types of metadata will be used by search engines and other information aggregators in the future to improve search results. Google already uses metadata (page titles and page headings) to help improve search results. Metadata like geocoding will allow search engines to group search results around an area (Google already does this with Google Local but I'm not exactly sure how they get their geographic information, I think they are creating their own metadata by examining a postal or mailing address on the site).