Tagging content and using metadata

While having current, relevant and interesting content is important, it is only useful if it can be found.

One of the most important ways to ensure content is found by any form of search is to tag it. This means applying a label with additional addition information called metadata. Tags and keywords are especially important for non-text content items such as images, animations and multimedia files.

You should discuss with your web developer whichtags and keywords are appropriate for your website to increase the discoverability of your content, both within the site and in search engines, to maximise search engine optimisation. Tags are also be useful if there are particular webpages that you wish to exclude from search engine results.

You can use tags to group information according to common themes, which is particularly useful for managing images and video files. Tags can include information ranging from:

• content or subject
• themes
• source
• time
• location.

Tag clouds

A tag cloud (such as the one on the home page of this site) displays the tags associated with a set of content—maybe a single web page, a website or related websites. It is usually presented using variable font sizes and/or colour to highlight tags belonging to the most popular content on a website. A tag cloud also provides a visually striking overview of all of the themes in a particular piece of content.

When a tag cloud contains links from the tags in the cloud to the most relevant page or to a list of search results containing that tag, it can be a powerful navigation tool because it allows people to explore the content of your site via themes.

Excluding content from search engine results

There are useful tools to increase the discoverability of your website by search engines (which should increase the number of visitor to your website) such as the Site Maps Protocol. Tags or metadata can also increase the discoverability or be used to exclude it from search results (for example, content on your site that is not an introductory page such as a payment page).

This can be important for ensuring pages that do not contain relevant content (such as pages presented during the payment process for an online transaction) do not appear in search results. This will assist customers, members, donors and supporters to more easily find relevant information about businesses and originations without picking up any irrelevant or unnecessary information in their searches.