How to Edit Meta Information with your Solodev Website

Metadata and meta information is the glue to your SEO efforts. It's also one of the best ways your website handles, sorts, and sifts through the mounds of information it contains. In short, metadata is data about data.

However, some CMS programs make it really difficult to edit that information. Before learning how Solodev makes that easy, it's important to know why metadata -- and a data-driven online presence -- is more important than you might realize. 

What is Metadata?

Metadata is the information on your website that gets sent to a search engine but your visitors will never see. While the most popular bits of metadata includes the majority of your website copy, metadata is so much more. A broader understanding of metadata is that it includes all elements from meta to link and script.

Content management systems and document management systems often use meta tags to organize the information stored and published on them. It can help the user get a list of content regarding a particular topic or isolate content created by certain authors. 

While Google and other search engines will still find popular documents that mention certain subjects, using metadata and meta tags at the bottom of a site show search engines that the subject of those tags are relevant to a particular search query.  

Why is Metadata Important?

The most common case for metadata's importance is SEO. However, that's far from the only reason why metadata is important. 

In a general sense, metadata catalogs your website, helping search engines find valuable resources, bringing similar resources together, and sorting out ones that might be different. 

Good metadata management gives companies of all sizes (but particularly larger enterprises) the ability to filter large data sets and get a better idea of what's going on across the company. Metadata puts that information into a uniform language that can be read and clearly understood. 

How to Edit the Metadata Information Using Solodev

Like any extensive data storage and maintenance, keeping tabs on metadata can be frustrating, time consuming, and require a lot of employee energy and manpower. However, with a CMS that allows you to swifty edit that metadata, it takes down the confusion.

Editing Sitewide Meta Information

At a global level, there may be a variety of meta information/meta tags you would like to include on all pages. This can include various Twitter-specific meta information, meta properties like "og:site_name" and "og:locale", and any other specific tags you may consider. Fortunately, Solodev makes it easy to both autopopulate and customize these sorts of meta tags.

Using the "Update Website" option (navigate to your website in the backend and click on "Update Website"), you can edit a variety of global meta tags. You can add your Twitter handle and Facebook URL, both of which will be used to populate tags specific to those platforms. Additionally, there's the "Global Header Insert" which allows you to add any number of meta tags to all pages.

Editing Page Meta Information

At the page level, you also have full granular control over the meta information included on a page-by-page basis. With ever page, you can click on the "Meta Information" tab. Here you can specify a whole host of preset meta fields such as Title (used for the Meta Title), Meta Keywords, and Meta Description. There's even the section for "Header Code". Anything added to this box will be included within the "head" tags of the source code. This way you can specify individual meta tags for each page, such as "og:image" tags.

Editing Module Meta Information

Depending on how your module is constructed and whether it is used to created frontend pages, you can include a specific Meta Data section as editable fields for your module entries. With this section, you can customize the Meta Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords for each individual entry.

For all pages, Solodev also prepopulates the most commonly used meta tags, such as the "DC.Date", "og:title", and "og:url" fields. As a consequence, and through a combination of the above possible customizations, you can ensure that each and every page is fully optimized from a meta tag perspective. Not only does this mean that your pages will be better positioned for organic SEO efforts, but all of your tracking programs will be satsified and report less issues or errors. This will thus give you a better baseline to measure SEO efforts all around.

Additionally, with Solodev there's no need to actually go into any source code to manage your meta tags. Everything can be edited directly via the CMS itself through the use of existing fields. This helps organizations streamline their meta editing workflow and allows content editors of all skill levels to edit this information directly.