What is Metadata?
Metadata describes content or objects with structured fields (e.g., product brand, size, material, color, price, image ALT, document author/date). It enables search, filtering, display, governance, and measurement across your stack.
How It Works (quick)
- Capture: From PIM/CMS, feeds, EXIF, user input, or extraction (entity/concept).
- Standardize: Controlled vocabulary, canonical IDs, units/currencies, locales.
- Store: In databases and the search index (doc values for sort/aggregations).
- Use: Filters/facets, ranking features, schema markup, sitemaps, analytics.
- Govern: Versioning, lineage, validation, PII redaction.
Why It Matters in E-commerce
- Findability: Accurate facets and synonyms increase recall and precision.
- Conversion: Rich PDPs and category pages with trustworthy attributes.
- SEO: Structured data (JSON-LD) and clean titles/descriptions improve snippets and eligibility for enhancements.
- Ops & BI: Reliable aggregations (sales by brand/material/size).
Best Practices
- Maintain a controlled vocabulary and taxonomy; never key on labels—use stable IDs.
- Localize units/currency and language; map vendor fields on ingest.
- Validate required fields; block publish for critical gaps.
- Keep provenance (source, timestamp) and run data quality checks.
- Expose metadata via schema.org (Product, Offer, Review, BreadcrumbList).
Challenges
- Vendor inconsistency; stale fields; duplicates; missing units; PII in free text.
Examples
- Size availability per variant fuels facet chips like “In stock in your size.”
- Material and care fields populate PDP bullets and Product schema.
Summary
Metadata turns messy content into structured, searchable, and measurable assets. Govern vocabularies, validate fields, and publish JSON-LD so shoppers (and search engines) can trust what they see.
