Remember META tags? Once upon a time, a finely crafted META keyword tag would get you the bourgeois treatment from search engines. You could specify exactly which search words should be associated with your site and, best of all, META tags were invisible to users, allowing webmasters a touch of the ol’ "editorial liberty."
Yeah. That didn’t last. Almost instantly, META tags were abused and mis-used by pageview-hungry Web developers, who crammed all sorts of irrelevant and naughty keywords in their pages, trying to shunt the flow of Web traffic their way. And now today Google and other search engines essentially ignore META keyword tags.
(Of course, if you’re absolutely adamant that your page be promoted in response to specific search terms, Google, Yahoo, HotBot and the gang are happy to help, but with an improved targeted-placement technique far less attractive to spammers: It’s called Advertising, and it costs cash-money.)
End of story? That’d be sad, indeed, because META keyword tags were a rather sweet idea, at least on paper: short, sensible descriptions of your site, tailored so that machines could quickly read and index it, and subsequently help people find it.
Well, META’s not dead.
In the pages that follow, I'll be giving you a bird’s eye view of a few independent technologies, each aspiring to get useful metadata back into the Web. Some are homegrown, some corporate, and some academic, but all of them let you enhance your site with useful information and improve the ways your site is associated with other sites. Sound interesting? Good, then here’s the game plan:
- We'll start with an explanation of that metadata word (so we can finally quit italicizing it).
- Next comes a tour of the platitudes and latitudes of GeoURL, a fun, on-your-site-in-just-ten-minutes META tag that pinpoints your webpage’s real-world location with GPS-style accuracy.
- Then we'll check out SMBmeta, a newly launched metadata framework designed to give small businesses their fair share of the Web limelight.
- We'll finish up with a macro look at some of the "Semantic Web" standards favored by the W3C: Dublin Core and RDF — and we’ll show them off a bit with FOAF (Friend of a Friend), an application which leverages both those high-minded efforts.
OK then, let’s get started!
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