Let’s get back to basics. If I’m to be honest, flashbacks of arguments with copywriters in ad agencies turn me off to the discussion of metadata. However the reality of the situation is that as Search and Social continue to rapidly converge, it is us SEOs that are left to pick up the technical end of the stick and metadata continues to land on our plate.
The most important function of metadata is not the ability to s, but its ability to encourage your content to make the best first impression possible. The Big 3 social networks all allow marketers the ability to provide metadata specific to the channel and therein lies the opportunity to provided titles, descriptions and pictures that resonate directly with audience in a given channel.
Adoption of New Metadata
The Common Crawl, which is an incredible resource that all SEOs should be at least mindful of, has developed a microsite called the Web Data Commons where they identify trends extracted from the Common Crawl corpus.Schema.org, the new vocabulary that search engines have forced us to learn without providing too much immediate benefit, appeared in 43.05% of the 1,811,471,956 typed entities that appeared in the 3,005,629,093 URLs on the 40,600,000 domains that make up the August 2012 Common Crawl Corpus. As you might imagine the highest occurring microformat types being used are by far VideoObject (Schema.org) and Breadcrumb (RDFa). This makes complete sense because those are the two that have the most direct value in the SERPs.
When compared to the 2010 Corpus, RDFa was of course the most popular, but in 2012 Schema.org came with a vengeance quickly closing the gap. You might think it more reasonable to use RDFa rather than Schema.org, but with the search engines pushing it you can expect a higher reward from Schema.org. So it’s a good time to embrace it.
Now on to the list!
The Usual Searchspects
While Google keeps messing around with our tried and true understanding of the title and meta description they are still the most important meta tags for an SEO to prepare. Obviously, the on-page content is key, but if we can’t get them to click through then what is the point? In an upcoming post on the Poetry of SEO, Devin Asaro will talk about how to approach this copy so that it is engaging and elegant and mimics ad copy. For the time being let’s just dive into the usual searchspects.
- Page Title –Long regarded as the most important on-page factor, the title tag has recently taken a lot of scrutiny. A recent post has determined that page titles aren’t limited to 70 characters, but rather pixel-width. Also a little further back Cyrus Shepard tested titles longer than 70 characters to see what Google would do. In the wild I’ve seen extremely long titles are oftentimes chopped down or rewritten algorithmically to display the most relevant text to a query.Unless you want to measure the pixel-width of your titles and hope that Google shows the right thing, your best bet is to make page titles as keyword-relevant as possible and up to 70 characters. I honestly can’t think of a case where I’ve left something up to Google and they did a better job than I thought I could.Format:<title>Up to 70 Characters of Keyword-relevant text here</title>
- Meta Description – If your webpage were a commercial, this would be its slogan. In our upcoming search behavior study in cooperation with SurveyMonkey we’ve found that 43.2% of people click on a given result due to the meta description. Gone are the days of meta descriptions that listed keywords and just said the “Official site of…” and the main purpose of this text is to draw the user in, let them know what to expect if they click and convince them to do so with a strong call to action. The kicker is you get 155 characters to make it happen; think of it as like writing a tweet, but with 15 extra characters.Format:<meta name=”description” content=”155 characters of message matching text with a call to action goes here”>
- Authorship Markup – As I predicted at SearchLove NYC in November 2011, and has been verified by Eric Schmidt, Google is going to rank content that is connected to authors that they deem to be reliable sources over content that is not. A cool visible incentive is that you get name and your pretty picture in the SERPs if you’re an author.
If you’re a publisher your posts start appearing in the right rail of the SERPs.
Now let’s look at the metatags that make the magic happen!
- Rel-Author– This is a meta tag that can be implemented that specifies who the author of a piece of content is and uses Google+ to identify them. Initially Google rolled this out as just a tag that you place in the <head> of the code, but ultimately they would realize it’s not realistic that authors will have that type of control over the page and expanded to a more modular form.Format:For the version that goes in the <head> tag, you use the following:<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR PERSONAL G+ PROFILE HERE]“/>For the more modular version you would emulate XFN’s rel-me and place the link directly on the page. I’ve got to admit this is a great link building strategy.<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>If you use this method you will have to take the second step in verification by linking to your content from your Google+ profile. For more information see Google’s explanation.
- Rel-Me – Rel-me is just the XFNversion of rel-author. You simply place the meta tag on a link back to your Google+ profile.Format:<a href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR PERSONAL G+ PROFILE NUMBER]” rel=”me”>Me on Google+</a>
- Rel-Publisher –Rel-publisher is for business entities to claim ownership of their content. This can be used in context with rel-author or in place of it, but you should be pointing to a business profile on Google+ rather than an individuals.Format:<link rel=”publisher” href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR BUSINESS G+ PROFILE HERE]“/>
Don’t be late to the authorship markup party as it would not be surprising to see Google wipe out the visibility of content simply because there are no verifiable authors connected to it.
Social Meta Tags
Social Media is obviously a great place for content discovery, but oftentimes the meta data created for Search is not enough to encourage people to click through therefore it is best to use the meta tags each social platform provides. These metatags are not about keyword stuffing at all, but rather grabbing people’s attention and getting them to click. We all know that the users of Google+ are primarily tech people, users on Facebook are busy stalking their ex-girlfriends and Twitter users are bombarded with timelines moving at the speed of thought. Let’s talk about the channel-specific metadata options.
OpenGraph tags
Facebook’s OpenGraph allows you to specify metadata to optimize how your content appears in a user’s timeline. The added benefit of using this data is that by creating an “Edge” in Facebook you can obtain some fantastic data about the users checking out your content via Facebook Insights. If you don’t use Open Graph tags Facebook will default to standard metadata.
- og:title –This is the title of the piece of content. You should use this as a headline that will appeal to the Facebook audience. It is completely ok to use a different title than the one on the actual site as long as the message is ultimately the same. You have 95 characters to work with.Format:<meta property=”og:title” content=”iAcquire’s awesome blog”/>
- og:type – This is the type of object your piece of content is. For your purposes it will usually be blog, website orarticle, but if you want to get fancy Facebook provides a complete list.Format:<meta property=”og:type” content=”article”/>
- og:image -This is the image that Facebook will show in the screenshot of the content. Be sure to specify a square image to ensure the best visibility in a user’s timeline. If you don’t specify an image at all you are left to the mercy of the user to pick which image represents your content based on what Facebook can scrape. That is typically not the way to ensure the best first impression.Format:<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.iacquire.com/some-thumbnail.jpg”/>
- og:url– This is simply the URL of the page (or edge). You should specify this especially if you have duplicate content issues to make sure the value of the edge in Facebook is consolidated into one URL.Format:<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://blog.iacquire.com”/>
- og:description -This is the description Facebook will show in the screenshot of the piece of content. Just like the standard meta description it should be catchy and contain a call to action, but in this case you have nearly twice the number of characters to work with. Make sure this too speaks to the Facebook audience. You have to 297 characters to make it happen.Format:<meta property=”og:description” content=”Stop hitting refresh on your ex-girlfriend’s Facebook page? You should check out the iAcquire blog and learn something instead”/>
- fb:admins – This metatag is critical for getting access to the wealth of data made available via Facebook Insights. You simply have to specify the Facebook User IDs in the metadata of those users you want to have access. For more information on Facebook Insights see the documentation.Format:<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”USER_ID”/>
Due to its overwhelming adoption, the other social networks will all default to Open Graph Meta tags if there are no other meta tags present. However, as I mentioned earlier in this discussion, to only prepare one set of metadata is to ignore the ability to speak to the different people in the different channels. Understanding that Google+ is mostly tech users, Facebook’s audience is far more varied and Twitter’s audience is often dealing with content flying by at the speed of thought – why not account for that with your metadata?
