Metadata & SEO

Metadata is what people see before they hear your music or read your work. It’s the title in a search result, the image in a Discord embed, the description in a podcast app.

Why It Matters

When someone pastes your link into a group chat, three things appear: a title, a description, and an image. If any are missing or generic, the link looks like spam. If they’re filled in, it looks like something worth clicking.

The same applies to search engines. A descriptive title and real description mean your content can be found by people searching for your kind of work.

Item Metadata

Required

Title: The name of this piece. Make it specific. “Track 01” doesn’t help anyone find you; “Rainfall at 3AM” does.

Description: Context, credits, notes (supports markdown). Appears on the item page, in search results, and in social media previews.
Tags: Hierarchical organization for browsing and search. See Tagging System.
Cover art: Shows up in social previews, RSS readers, and podcast apps. Without it, shared links look incomplete.

Optional

Release date: When it was or will be released. Future dates work for pre-announcements.
Credits: Collaborators, producers, engineers. Linked to their profiles if they’re on the platform.
Lyrics / transcript: For audio and video items. Helps with accessibility and search.
Duration: Auto-detected for audio and video. Override if the detection is wrong.

Project Metadata

Projects (albums, series, collections) have their own metadata separate from individual items:

Title: Album or collection name
Description: What this collection is about
Cover art: Project-level artwork (shared by items that don’t have their own)
Release date: For the project as a whole
Item ordering: Track or chapter order within the project

Audio Auto-Extraction

When you upload audio files (MP3, FLAC, M4A, WAV), we read the embedded metadata automatically:

What we extract	Source tags
Title	ID3 TIT2 / Vorbis TITLE
Artist	ID3 TPE1 / Vorbis ARTIST
Album	ID3 TALB / Vorbis ALBUM
Track number	ID3 TRCK / Vorbis TRACKNUMBER
Year	ID3 TDRC / Vorbis DATE
Genre	ID3 TCON / Vorbis GENRE
Cover art	ID3 APIC / Vorbis METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE

You can override any extracted value after upload. If your files have good tags already, most metadata fills itself in.

What we don’t extract: Lyrics, credits, custom fields. Add these manually through the item editor.

Social Media Previews

When someone shares your link on Discord, Twitter, Mastodon, or any platform that supports Open Graph tags, they see:

Title: Your item or project title
Description: First 160 characters of your description
Image: Your cover art, sized for social display
Player embed: For audio and video items, platforms with Open Graph player support (Discord, Slack, Twitter) show an inline player

Checking Your Previews

Paste your published item URL into a group chat or social media post (you can delete it after). If the image is missing or the description is blank, go back and fill those in.

Search Engine Optimization

We handle the technical SEO automatically:

Page titles follow the pattern: Item Title - Creator Name | Makenot.work
Meta descriptions use the first 160 characters of your description, or an auto-generated summary
Structured data (JSON-LD) tells search engines this is a product with pricing, enabling rich results
Canonical URLs prevent duplicate content issues
Sitemap updated automatically when you publish

What You Control

The two things that matter most for discoverability are your title and description. Use words that someone searching for your kind of work would actually type.

Weak: “New Release”. Matches nothing specific.

Better: “Ambient Techno EP: Four Tracks, Berlin 2026”. Matches genre, format, location, year.