How we use metadata

Metadata is data about data. On the web it is use to describe a webpage. This information is not visible on your page, it is used by browsers, search engines and other services. Meta tags should always be placed inside the <head> in your HTML document.

Our basic metadata stack is a mix of Dublin Core and Open Graph:

  • title
  • dcterms.title
  • dcterms.creator
  • dcterms.description
  • dcterms.publisher
  • og:title
  • og:description
  • og:url
  • og:site_name
  • og:type
  • og:image
  • og:image:alt

Some additional tags we use are:

  • fb:app_id – this tag associates your page with Facebook allowing you to use Facebook insights to view analytics for traffic to your site from Facebook.
  • twitter:site – this tag associates your page with your Twitter account.

For marketing campaigns we will occasionally use additional Twitter specific tags (twitter:card, twitter:site in particular) to configure the ‘card’ that will show when the URL of the page is tweeted.

Part of our process is reviewing pages with the Facebook Sharing Debugger. This will give you a preview of the ‘card’ that will appear when you share your link.

For marketing pages that we’ve added Twitter specific tags for, we also review using the Twitter validator.