Government of Canada Internet Guide
This section defines metadata and explains how to create metadata for on-line
information.
General Guidance
Defining metadata and its importance
Preparing Meta Tags
Writing meta tags
Metadata Standard (Dublin Core)
Following Treasury Board Common Look and Feel (CLF) Standards
Metadata is information about information. Metadata identifies and organizes
information on-line, makes searching and browsing more precise, helps you
manage the information lifecycle, promotes the interoperability and
sharing of information resources, and can provide consistent and
predictable search results.
Metadata helps search engines - and, hence, your clients - find your document,
prioritize it in the search results, describe it clearly and make vital
information about it easily accessible.
Using the right tools, your clients can refine their searches based on fields in
the metadata, including the author's name, the resource title or
keywords. Specifically, metadata can make it easier to deliver a smaller,
more manageable and more precise search result list, compared to the list
delivered by a full-text search.
Meta tags are the information about your document hidden and imbedded in the
page source coding. They include keywords used to describe your document,
a sentence describing it, the author's name, the date posted, the date the
document should be updated and other relevant information.
The keyword tag provides keywords for search engines to associate with your
page. Current thinking is that when it comes to keyword tags, less is more.
Overloading your keyword meta tag with many keywords only reduces their impact
on your rankings. List all the keywords your main clients might use to search
for your Web page. Then use only five to seven of the most relevant ones on each
page, and use different ones to describe the content of different Web pages.
The description tag is a sentence, usually a maximum of 25 words in each
official language, that describes your page. It comes up on a user's screen as
the result of a search in some search engines. If there is no description tag,
the search engine might use the first 25, 50 or 100 words appearing on your Web
page to describe your site. (This is another reason to carefully choose the
headings of your Web pages.) In the description tag, use as many keywords
as possible, but make sure the sentence is coherent. You might want to
write a description tag for each group of keywords used to describe your
most important Web pages.
Ask your designer to add the descriptions and keywords to the relevant Web
pages. Every six months, or when you add new material to your Web pages,
revisit your description and keywords to see whether they are still
relevant. If not, replace them.
To view meta tags in Netscape and Explorer, go to View on the top menu of the
page (beside File and Edit) and click on Page Source (Source in Explorer).
Scroll down the lines of coding and look for the word "META" to see
the description and keywords.
As per Common Look and Feel
Standard 6.3 requirements, all Government of Canada Web pages must contain
metadata to facilitate information retrieval and client access. The metadata
is part of the coding. Clients do not see it, but search engines use it. Here
are the meta tags to be used in the coding:
<head>
<title>Insert title of the resource here</title>
<link rel="schema.dc" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<meta name="dc.title" content="Insert title of the resource here">
<meta name="dc.creator" content="Insert name of creator of the resource
here">
<meta name="dc.subject" scheme="Insert label of scheme name used here"
content="Insert terms from a controlled source here, separated by
semi-colons">
<meta name="dc.date.created" content="Insert the creation date of the resource,
following the YYYY-MM-DD format">
<meta name="dc.date.modified" content="Insert the date of last modification
of the resource, following the YYYY-MM-DD format">
<meta name="dc.language" scheme="ISO639-2" content="Insert fre or eng depending
on the language of the resource">
<meta name="dc.description" content="Insert a short description of the
resource here; this is an optional element">
<meta name="description" content="Insert a short description of the resource
here; this is an optional element">
<meta name="keywords" content="Insert keywords here, separated by commas; this
is an optional element">
</head>
For definitions of tags and HTML mark-up, see the Information Management Resource
Centre (IMRC) - Common Look and Feel Metadata
Standard Definitions and HTML Examples.
Best Practices
Stay in contact with your institutional IM specialist who manages Web
information, as well as with your departmental librarian or someone from
your records management office.
Visit the Canada site for an on-line meta tag
generator.
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