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.

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.