What are the different types of Metadata?

Metadata, Metadata as far as the eye can see.

There are several types of Metadata, including:

• Descriptive

• Structural

• Administrative

• Technical

• Provenance

• Statistical

But how can these help with your business?

Let's break it down.

Descriptive Metadata helps find content, either by searching or filtering. Every piece of Content should have at least a Title and a Description; you can then layer on Keywords, tags and dates.

If visitors to your website can't find what they want, you'll lose business.

Structural Metadata helps your Content to be organized and shows relationships between Content.

Is your business throwing an event? Are you connected to an events page? Do the people using your site know the location of the event? If you are selling a product, do you have similar products you can show?

Administrative Metadata helps manage resources behind the scenes. Think of Permissions and access rights, copyright information and file types and formats.

If your CMS is difficult to use in the back end, it will also be a mess on the public-facing front end.

Technical Metadata is about your assets, such as file sizes, resolution, and encoding.

How big are your file sizes? Are they optimized for Mobile and Desktop?

Provenance Metadata is about version control. Who created the Content, who modified it, and when did they change it?

If your business has outdated information, that's lost revenue and, worse, a lawsuit.

Statistical Metadata is all about analytics. Who is visiting your site, and from where? How many visits are you getting?

How well is your site performing for your business? Are you losing out on revenue?

Rights Metadata is about ownership, licensing and restrictions.

You want to make sure your business is on the up and up. Is everything legal and ethical on your website?