Metadata & SEO

I'm going to turn geek on you and talk about metadata and SEO for the next 10 mins or so. This is going to be in the context of writing for websites - headings, webpages, page content. In its simplest form, metadata is the key words and phrases that describe the content of a page - and this helps your search engine optimisation (SEO). You use metadata in page content but also in HTML coding, so it sits in the background of your website and search engines like Google scan the coding and words to place your website in search results. The better your metadata within your website, the better your SEO ie. you'll be ranked higher up in search results. I'm just getting started with metadata. All I've done so far is add a tag line for my complete website, something along the lines of "Piara Strainge's website about writing" - probably needs more work! The next step will be to tag line each individual webpage. Then I'll go through the content on the pages and tag line headings and key words. You have to think about your website in different stages - firstly as a whole entity, then as pages with different topics being covered. If I come across any great non-technical resources online to help us, I'll be sure to post them for you!