What Is Metadata? SEO and the Hidden Information in Photos

Metadata means "data about data": information that describes the actual content but is usually not visible, such as a web page's title and description, or the date, device and location of a photo. For your business, metadata has two sides. One side is SEO: the page title and meta description affect how you appear on Google. The other side is privacy: a photo you upload to your site may carry the coordinates of the place where it was taken.

What is metadata?

Think of a book. The book itself is the content. The title and author's name on the cover, the blurb on the back, the ISBN and the print date are information about the book, in other words its metadata. You can tell what the book is about from this information without reading it.

In the digital world, everything has metadata too:

• Web page: Page title, meta description, language information, and the title and image shown when the page is shared on social media.
• Photo: Date and time taken, device model, lens and exposure settings, and sometimes GPS coordinates. This information is stored using a standard called EXIF.
• Document: The author's name, creation date and the person who last edited a PDF or Word file.

Metadata on a web page and SEO

Page title

The page title is defined with the HTML <title> tag. It appears in the browser tab and is the main source of the title link Google shows in search results. Google's recommendations, in brief:

• Give every page its own descriptive, short title.
• Avoid vague titles like "Home."
• Don't list the same words over and over (keyword stuffing).
• You can add your brand name at the beginning or end with a short separator.

If the title isn't suitable, Google may build its own title link from other sources, such as the main heading on the page. That's why it matters that the title is consistent with the page content.

Meta description

The meta description is a short summary of the page that visitors don't see directly; it is one of the possible sources of the description text (snippet) in search results. According to Google's documentation, snippets are mostly generated from the page content; Google uses the meta description when it summarizes the page better than the content does. So the description you write may not appear for every search, but a well-written one increases the chance that it will.

Google's recommendations for meta descriptions:

• Write a separate description for each page. Using the same description on every page doesn't help.
• Use sentences that explain what the page offers, not a list of keywords.
• Google sets no length limit for meta descriptions; results are truncated depending on screen width. In practice, it helps to put the important information in the first sentence.

The "meta keywords" tag

Older sites still have long lists of words in the <meta name="keywords"> tag. In 2009 Google announced that it does not use this tag in web search ranking. You don't need to spend time filling it in.

We covered this and other building blocks of SEO in more depth in our post What is SEO?

The hidden information in photos: EXIF and GPS

A photo taken with a phone or digital camera stores a set of technical information alongside the image. This information is recorded using the EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) standard. Today the standard is jointly managed by JEITA and CIPA (the Japanese camera and imaging products association). Besides the date taken, device model and shooting settings, EXIF can contain GPS information in a separate section: latitude, longitude, altitude and a GPS timestamp.

If location services are turned on for your phone's camera, the photos you take very likely carry these coordinates. When you upload the photo to a website as is, this information can stay inside the file and be read by anyone who downloads it.

Risks for businesses

• Home address: A product photo taken at home by a team member who works from home can reveal their home location.
• Client premises: A photo of work you did at a client's home or facility can give away that client's address, even if you don't write the client's name.
• Employees: In team photos, people's images are already personal data; location and time information is an extra layer on top of that.

The general framework under PDPL

Under Turkey's Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL, Law No. 6698), personal data is "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person." The location data in a photo may not seem to identify a person on its own. But combined with the person, home or project shown in the photo, it can become linkable to a specific individual. The law also sets out as a principle that personal data must be relevant, limited and proportionate to the purposes for which it is processed. You don't need location data for the purpose of publishing a product or portfolio photo. That's why the safest approach is not to publish unnecessary metadata in the first place.

Which obligations arise in which situation depends on the details of the case. If you regularly publish photos of clients or employees, we recommend speaking with a legal advisor.

Does WordPress remove photo metadata?

Not entirely. Since version 4.5, WordPress has stripped unnecessary metadata from copies resized with the Imagick image library. However, according to WordPress's own announcement, color profiles and EXIF, XMP and IPTC profiles are preserved, and the original full-size file you upload is not changed at all. So you shouldn't rely on WordPress and assume location data will be removed automatically. It's safer to clean the file before uploading.

A practical checklist

For SEO:

• Does every important page have its own title and meta description?
• Do the titles describe the page's actual content, or have they turned into keyword lists?
• Are image file names and alt texts descriptive?

For privacy:

• Has GPS information been removed from photos to be uploaded to the site? Phone sharing settings and the export settings of many image editing programs include an option to remove location and metadata.
• Has the client given consent for photos taken at their premises?
• Do PDFs and documents published on the site still contain information such as the author's name or internal file paths?

When preparing images for the web, you also need to think about format and size; we covered this in our post on lossy and lossless compression.

The useful side of metadata

Not all metadata is a risk. Google says it can read fields such as "Creator," "Credit Line" and "Copyright Notice" from IPTC photo metadata embedded in images, and it can show details such as the image's creator in Google Images. So it is possible to remove sensitive information like location while keeping what helps you, such as copyright and creator information.

Our experience

On this site (artsution.com.tr), we write page titles and meta descriptions in Yoast SEO, separately for each page. For our blog posts, we prepare each post's title and description together with the post itself, so the summary shown in search results reflects what the post really covers.

On the image side, we follow this approach in our projects: when we resize photos for the web before uploading them to sites, we also remove unnecessary metadata and give them descriptive file names and alt texts. We take particular care that location data doesn't remain in the file for photos taken at client premises.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion

Metadata is both an opportunity and a responsibility for your business. The page title and meta description shape how you look on Google. The hidden information in photos, on the other hand, can lead you to publish a client's or employee's location without realizing it. Making both a routine step in your publishing process is much easier than fixing things afterwards.

If you'd like to review your site's metadata and image publishing process together, take a look at our web design and WordPress development services, or get in touch with us.