Ensure your web content can be found easily by including good metadata
What is metadata?
All content published on Curtin's websites, whether it is a web page or a downloadable document, should incorporate descriptive information (e.g. author, title, subject). This is known as metadata.
Why do I need to review my metadata?
Providing good metadata will help your web pages to be found. We have recently implemented improvements to Curtin's Web Search but this technology can only go so far in improving the 'findability' of your web content. The new search engine gives a higher weighting to metadata than page content to provide more relevant search results. All web content owners are being asked to review their web pages in preparation for the 2008 AUQA Audit, so now is a good time to also review and improve the metadata on these same pages.
Common problems with our current metadata
Some of the current problems with Curtin's web content metadata are:
- In many cases, all pages in a website have exactly the same set of metadata
- Only a limited number of relevant keywords have been included
- Page descriptions are often very brief, providing only a small number of terms to be indexed
- Some pages don't include all mandatory meta-tags
- Some fields which should be identical (to support different search engines) contain different information
To see a summary of the web metadata on your site, try our new metadata reporting tool. It generates reports on the web metadata for most Curtin websites on demand. Note: You'll need to login with your Curtin ID and password to use this.
How do I create good metadata for my web pages?
- Review the Metadata User Guide for descriptions of the different metadata elements and how they should be used.
- Consider the different terms people may use when they are searching for your web page.
- If you use Adobe Contribute you can update the title, description and keywords metadata yourself. To update other items of metadata, please liaise with the CITS Web Team.
- If you use an HTML editor (like Adobe Dreamweaver) you can use the metadata template and follow the instructions to automatically generate relevant metadata to add to your pages.
- You can also edit page metadata directly in the head section of each page using your HTML editor. (See below for pointers about doing this with the ColdFusion framework.)
- If you have content that's password protected, consider including keywords that describe it on the login page.
Get help with your metadata on our metadata help page.
Sign-off by Web Account Holders
To verify that metadata on all Curtin subdomains have been reviewed and improved, a formal sign-off is requested by 30 June 2008. Once web account holders have finished updating the metadata on a subdomain they are responsible for, they need to complete a simple web form. If updates to a subdomain won't be complete by the end of June, the form should still be completed with an indication of when the updates will be completed by. Follow this link to the sign-off form.
Note: You'll need to login with your Curtin ID and password to access this form.
