| Meta data….What is it and how do I write it? |
| In a nutshell Meta data is the information that tells a search engine a few details about your contribution – it’s how your contribution identifies itself to the World Wide Web. You don’t see Meta data on your contributions but it is an important part of advertising your work so that it can be easily found by search engines and in the LANDshapes archive itself. |
| Meta keywords |
| Once you’ve had a go you’ll see how easy it is. In the archive you’re asked for two kinds of Meta data. These are Meta keywords and Meta description. In the screen shot below you can see what Meta keywords look like for a contribution about an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. |
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Notice how all the words are in lower case. That’s because Meta data isn’t case sensitive so it doesn’t matter if you forget capital letters. Whenever you write Meta data for a contribution you should start with the words landshapes, the national forest, landscape, history, with each word separated by a comma – it doesn’t matter what order you put them in.
Whatever keywords you use should reflect what’s in the contribution, so if you can you should include things like the name of the author, the archaeological period and location details of the original reference, but you should always include the title! |
| Meta description |
Meta descriptions take much less work because they’re just a copy of your contribution’s detailed description which you entered at stage 7 of the input process.
Below, you can see the Meta description of the Anglo-Saxon burial ground reference – this is exactly the same as the detailed description, just copy and paste it in to the box. |
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| After clicking the save button you’re done! You may need to update the Meta data in the future if you update the contribution but usually once it’s written that’s it. |
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