# 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.

### Recommended

- **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](./tags.md).
- **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.

## See Also

- [Audio Hosting](./audio.md): File formats and metadata auto-extraction
- [Tagging System](./tags.md): Hierarchical tag structure and best practices
- [Items](./items.md): Items, projects, and organization