Using Metadata Appropriately

December 6, 2016 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Using Metadata Appropriately

Metadata is used for many things, even in addition to the ones the NSA uses. In publishing, one of the simplest ways online to get more hits for your book is to have good descriptive metadata. Digital Book World brought this news to us in their article, “An Introduction to Effective and Descriptive Metadata.”

Descriptive metadata is self-defining—it’s metadata that describes the book and its creators. If metadata accurately describes the book, then when the customer reads a description matching exactly what they want, you’ve made a sale.

Having good keywords and subject codes makes it so the book can be found both more easily and where it’s supposed to be located. Customers may not know that they’re looking for your book, but having it in the right place can lead them to it.

If a customer already has an idea about the book they want to buy, or knows specifically about the book without knowing the title, keywords are there to help.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.