Web Metadata Standards: Improving Website Visibility

Goddard, Lisa (2009) Web Metadata Standards: Improving Website Visibility. Technical Report. Unpublished, St. John's. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

It is vital that the library website be well-indexed in search engines, that our hit list results are well formatted and contain useful information, and that our pages receive high rankings when they are particularly relevant to an information need. Metadata and tag structure is also used by screen readers and other accessibility tools. Finally, the way in which a web site is structured will greatly impact its ability to incorporate emerging metadata standards, and the availability of applications which can parse and re-format data for export to other types of applications. When we talk about metadata on a website, we are talking about much more than simply meta tags. Many things will affect the ability of a third party application to parse, harvest, or re-use website data, including the structure of the page, the tags used, the text in title and H1 tags, class names, and compliance with web standards. The topic of web metadata is therefore rather broad in scope. This report attempts to outline the existing standards that impact the parsing and indexing of web sites. Where appropriate I also note some of the modules in Drupal and Joomla that may be useful for improving page structure, semantic interoperability, and search engine optimization.

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