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# Metadata & SEO |
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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. |
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## Why It Matters |
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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. |
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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. |
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## Item Metadata |
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### Required |
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- **Title**: The name of this piece. Make it specific. "Track 01" doesn't help anyone find you; "Rainfall at 3AM" does. |
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### Recommended |
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- **Description**: Context, credits, notes (supports markdown). Appears on the item page, in search results, and in social media previews. |
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- **Tags**: Hierarchical organization for browsing and search. See [Tagging System](./tags.md). |
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- **Cover art**: Shows up in social previews, RSS readers, and podcast apps. Without it, shared links look incomplete. |
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### Optional |
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- **Release date**: When it was or will be released. Future dates work for pre-announcements. |
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- **Credits**: Collaborators, producers, engineers. Linked to their profiles if they're on the platform. |
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- **Lyrics / transcript**: For audio and video items. Helps with accessibility and search. |
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- **Duration**: Auto-detected for audio and video. Override if the detection is wrong. |
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## Project Metadata |
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Projects (albums, series, collections) have their own metadata separate from individual items: |
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- **Title**: Album or collection name |
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- **Description**: What this collection is about |
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- **Cover art**: Project-level artwork (shared by items that don't have their own) |
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- **Release date**: For the project as a whole |
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- **Item ordering**: Track or chapter order within the project |
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## Audio Auto-Extraction |
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When you upload audio files (MP3, FLAC, M4A, WAV), we read the embedded metadata automatically: |
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| Title | ID3 TIT2 / Vorbis TITLE | |
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| Artist | ID3 TPE1 / Vorbis ARTIST | |
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| Album | ID3 TALB / Vorbis ALBUM | |
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| Track number | ID3 TRCK / Vorbis TRACKNUMBER | |
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| Year | ID3 TDRC / Vorbis DATE | |
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| Genre | ID3 TCON / Vorbis GENRE | |
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| Cover art | ID3 APIC / Vorbis METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE | |
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You can override any extracted value after upload. If your files have good tags already, most metadata fills itself in. |
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**What we don't extract:** Lyrics, credits, custom fields. Add these manually through the item editor. |
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## Social Media Previews |
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When someone shares your link on Discord, Twitter, Mastodon, or any platform that supports Open Graph tags, they see: |
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- **Title**: Your item or project title |
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- **Description**: First 160 characters of your description |
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- **Image**: Your cover art, sized for social display |
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- **Player embed**: For audio and video items, platforms with Open Graph player support (Discord, Slack, Twitter) show an inline player |
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### Checking Your Previews |
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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. |
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## Search Engine Optimization |
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We handle the technical SEO automatically: |
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- **Page titles** follow the pattern: `Item Title - Creator Name | Makenot.work` |
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- **Meta descriptions** use the first 160 characters of your description, or an auto-generated summary |
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- **Structured data** (JSON-LD) tells search engines this is a product with pricing, enabling rich results |
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- **Canonical URLs** prevent duplicate content issues |
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- **Sitemap** updated automatically when you publish |
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### What You Control |
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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. |
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**Weak:** "New Release". Matches nothing specific. |
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**Better:** "Ambient Techno EP: Four Tracks, Berlin 2026". Matches genre, format, location, year. |
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## See Also |
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- [Audio Hosting](./audio.md): File formats and metadata auto-extraction |
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- [Tagging System](./tags.md): Hierarchical tag structure and best practices |
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- [Items](./items.md): Items, projects, and organization |
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