Metadata
What is Metadata, and Why is it Important?
Metadata describes data, providing information like data type, length, textual description, and other characteristics of the data.
We use metadata to communicate and clarify website information for search engines that searches for sites based on the words users have keyed in. In other words, we use the metadata to define a description, keywords, and the author of a web page.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are the words that are hidden in your web page. They are used by search engines to index web pages based on title, description, and even keywords.
There are many Meta tags but the title of your page, the keywords and the description Meta tag are very important.
Metadata in Cascade CMS
In Cascade CMS, you see a section called Metadata.
In the editing view within Cascade, when you click on Metadata, you’ll see some fields that are mandatory to fill out.
Display Name:
Represents the page title of the page. It’s very important to fill it out as visitors can see this information at the very top of the browser window when they click on the web page. Also, Google will use the page title in search results.
Summary:
Represents a brief statement of the web page. It’s very important to fill it out as Google will sometimes use the summary information of a page in search results.
Teaser:
Represents a short and punchy sentence/phrase about the page. You can copy and paste the summary information for this section.
Keywords:
Meta keywords used to help define the primary keywords of a web page.
You should use a comma to separate the Meta keywords. The most important thing to keep in mind when selecting your Meta keywords is to be sure that each keyword accurately reflects the content of your pages.
Don't add too many words. Make sure that you put the 10 most important keywords first as the most search engines will index these words.
For example, you use some keywords below in Graduate page.
Description:
Describes the content of a web page. Use no more than 200 characters. It’s very important as the Meta description should give search engine users a brief description of what they'll find if they click through to your site.
Author:
Make the author of the site your department name (i.e. Department of Chemistry). Do not use any one person’s name.
In the example below, let’s assume that you have used ‘Graduate Research Services’ as Author in a Graduate page.
