The Best Meta Data for your Pages (aka The Things we Do so You Don't Have To)

Sometimes R & D projects grow out of all proportion. A simple request from a number of Affino users has been to add the Facebook Like button to Affino. Seemed simple enough, but pretty quickly we hit the Open Graph requirement (for references see below) which is that the pages have to contain specific Meta Data to work well with Facebook.

This lead to a nice bit or R & D which we thought we would share with you to see if anyone has any further thoughts / suggestions, and to give you insight into the research that is ongoing for Affino.

The Meta Data R & D Process

This lead to research into the Open Open Graph and Facebook’s implementation, which are or course slightly different (although both originated by Facebook). Facebook highlights that actually the Open Graph API is based on RDFa. More research shows that actually the initial Facebook implementation is / was (depends on when you read this) somewhat buggy.

A quick scan of the Open Graph forums highlights specific syntax issues, and also highlighted that since both it, and Dublin Core (W3C approved standard for semantic web) have overlapping functionality it made sense to review all the Dublin Core Meta Data Affino generates for each page.

A quick scan showed that Affino’s implementation has been deprecated (i.e. no longer the latest standard). More research showed that many more pages still run on the old one rather than the new RDFa version. This brought on a lot of research into how sites are using Dublin Core and what elements (and how) we should be using it. We’re gone with a more refined version than the previous one and removed a couple of values which don’t make sense.

We’ve supported eGMS tagging for years, so I decided to do some research and see if it had any relevance any more by looking at a number of UK government sites, as well as leading government sponsored sites such as the BBC. The conclusion is that eGMS is a waste of time. Virtually no one uses it, and certainly I can’t think of any UK Govt search engine that any one uses, so it’s out.

We’ve kept the core Title and Meta tags, as well as key language, site indexing, content freshness and of course the Google Canonical link, so essential for SEO.

There is a vast amount of automation / logic which goes into actually presenting the appropriate content in each tag, and we’ll be refining that with the next release.

Additionally we spent considerable time looking into how the key standards bodies use their (and other Meta tags), it has to be said that they do a pretty terrible job on the whole. We also looked into what most other platforms so, and again it’s on the whole shockingly poor, no idea why. We were looking for great ideas that we could learn from, but there really weren’t many.

The biggest amount of time went into digesting all the information and working through the Mindmap, a small part of which you can see above. Without using Mindmapping, the whole process would probably have taken three times as long since it helped to move / focus / laterally approach the whole Meta Data topic in the most effective way.

What Comes Next

The next phase is going to be all about in-page Meta Data improvements, including Good Relations, and RDFa / Microformats(which Google Likes). We will also be marking up reviews and more of the media content.

Of course all of it will be as automated as possible, so that all you will need to do is add your content and make sure you tag it in the best way (or at least have a good keyword list).

We will of course also be adding the Facebook Like button to the Social Bookmarker Profile / Bar. You’ll just have to change a couple of settings once you upgrade to the next Affino release to have everything work nicely for you.

Useful References

Official Facebook Open Graph Developer Page

Official Open Graph Protocol Page

Useful Open Graph Group Thread

RDFa Wikipedia Page

RDFa Primer

Dublin Core / RDFa

W3C RDFa Primer

Good Relations

Open Calais

How To Turn Your Site Into A Facebook Fan Page

Creating a Facebook App

Facebook URL Linter

Join the Conversation

Let me know what your thoughts are on the Meta Data, do you like what where we’re taking it? Do you have great ideas of your own you would like to see included in Affino? Do you have great examples of existing sites / platforms? Please post in the comments below.