Wattpad India Awards 2021

Learn: Discoverability & Metadata

Metadata is the information that describes your story to readers, in turn increasing the story's discoverability. This is an effective and easy way to promote stories. It's how readers find you and your stories on Wattpad and beyond, and it has a huge impact on their reading decisions.

Metadata tells readers the title and the author name. It is more or less the information about your story and any other relevant information that readers use to find your story. Having complete and accurate metadata, has been proven to have a positive impact on readership growth.

For Wattpad India Awards it does not matter how many reads your story has. This chapter's purpose is to help you grow your audience, and help make you more discoverable to Wattpad HQ, but it does not guarantee that your audience will grow.

This is to better your understanding about how people find your stories. We do not penalize you for having the wrong information. However, having the wrong markers makes it hard for readers to find your story, so it's a penalty you're imposing on yourself.

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Tags

Tags are part of a story's metadata. While the genres influence the way Wattpad will categorize a story, keywords will power the results of any organic search done by readers, especially on Wattpad.

E.g. a search using the search bar for "fakeromance" will return search results that prioritize stories with those words in the title, but also include stories with that phrase in the tags.

Tags' job is to:

- Describe a story's content

- Help people find stories

- Convert a browsing user to your reader.

It helps readers understand:

- What the story is about

-If it matches what they're trying to find or if it is relevant

-If they can trust that the information is accurate.

It's important that the information accurately represents your story. Anything that doesn't match the above criteria will lead to low click-through rates and conversions, and thus a lower ranking in search results. Relevant terms should align with a reader's needs. So don't use anything so specific as people won't search for, and don't use terms that aren't accurate for your story.

Try to keep tags short, because readers aren't likely to use long phrases in a search. Search queries will match full phrases. For example if you put #darkhumor it will only match for people who searched for exactly that. Breaking it out into #dark and #humor is more likely to return a match. In some cases it makes sense to keep things together like #vigilantejustice or #sciencefiction where the exact phrase is meaningful.

Which tags should you use?

It's always better if you have a mix of both : descriptive tags and marketing tags

<< descriptive tags >>

If you had to describe your story in a handful of words, which ones would you choose? Ideally you should be picking at least 10 descriptive words. Try to pick 1-2 words that fall under each of these buckets:

- Setting (e.g. India)

- Time-period (e.g. 1920s, contemporary)

- Story theme (e.g. coming-of-age, magical)