So, just last night I was playing around with my Soundcloud account (don’t worry, it’s not that great) when I realized that there was an option to manipulate the metadata for my music channel. Metadata is defined as "data that describes your content and, consequently, gives that content powerful capability” by Colleen Jones. Options such as music type, description, and hashtags had fields for me to fill out. Turns out that, if used properly, this could improve my tracks’ searchability and visibility on Soundcloud. It won’t be as high as the “pro members” who pay to get higher up on the list; however, it could raise my ranking in the organic search results. This could help me get my music out there and be a form of content marketing.
If I were to start a website for this band, then this would be a great form of marketing I could use through Google or any other search engine. This made me think that Google probably has a free class on this subject (they do here).
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The most difficult part of setting up the meta-data is finding the best keywords that would “speak” to Google. Michele Linn from Content Marketing Institute talks about some important aspects of metadata. She mentions tags, categories, the quantity of words, quality of word choice, and evolving the metadata over time. These are all things that I could potentially weave into the band’s website when it starts running.
Colleen Jones from Content Science Review talks about the 4 D’s of marketing being “Discover, Distribution, Delight, and Deduction”. Discover refers to how well the metadata explains the content, distribution is the spread of content based on the metadata, delight is having relevant and great content, and deduction is how people interact with the content. This relates back to the evolution of SEO from prioritizing “Black Hat Techniques” to preferring “White Hat Techniques”. Where quality is now being preferred by algorithms over quantity. This is great insight that should be kept in mind when building content marketing. This also means I might have to start taking my time on the music content and write a few great songs instead of a lot of mediocre ones!
I never knew how important metadata was to a website before this deep dive into the subject. I personally will be taking that Google course later to expand my knowledge on this subject even further.
What do you guys think? Do you think that acquiring this virtual certificate would be worth it? Do you think the knowledge alone gleaned from the course would be worth it? Let me know in the comments section below.
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