Metadata Schema

This term tends to scary people. But don't worry, nothing is going to explode.

Metadata can be defined as data that describes other data.

A schema is just a fancy Kantian word for a plan.

A Brief History of Meta Data on the World Wide Web

Back in the mid 1990's "meta tags" were all the rage, especially the "Keywords" meta tag, which web indexes such as Alta Vista erroneously considered as very, very important. Thus most webmasters (us included) loaded their client's pages with metadata tags with strings such as "shop", "shop now", "buy now", "buy x", etc.

In the late 1990's, Google and others thankfully refined web searching and made the meta tag loading practice pretty much irrelevant. The new wave of "spiders", as they are called, ignored Keyword meta tags altogether and focused on what was actually on the page itself. Another brilliant idea, probably taken from studying 14 year-old girls shopping, was to take into consideration how relevant/popular a page was while ranking it.

So why are metadata schemes still important?

Some meta tags such as Title, Description, and DocType still play a vital role in external searches from our friends at Google, MSN, Yahoo, et al.

Perhaps equally importantly, internal search engines use this data to search and thus you can tweak certain pages to appear when the user types in common phrases such as "Shop", "Help", or "Product X".

And last and not least, we use metadata schemas as another tool to improve site organization to its fullest potential and as a quick code reference to what content goes where. As any good Virgo will tell you, every second spent planning will reap minutes of time back in unnecessary re-designing and inefficiencies.