One of the essential uses of metadata for photographic images is to indicate who owns the image and how to get in touch with them. After all, if you publish your images on the web they're going to be distributed (and copied) far and wide, you want to be able for viewers and users of your imagery to be able to know who made it and how to get in touch with you. Therefore, you should always make sure that this essential data is set for your photographs.

In Lightroom, the place to set this information is in the IPTC area the Metadata panel. The first bit of data you want to make sure to enable is the Copyright Status and Owner fields. For example, all of my photos have the following IPTC Copyright details:

Next up, you'll want to make sure that people can get in touch with you if they want to use your image. To give them a chance of being able to, fill in the Contact portion of the IPTC metadata. Here's what this panel looks like in my own workspace:

The quick and easy way to set this metadata, of course, is to do so in during import. You should have a metadata preset defined for this and use it when your import your images.

Finally, when exporting images, Lightroom provides an option to minimize metadata included with the file. The Lightroom documentation says that even when you check this box, your copyright information will still be embedded into your photographs.

All of this is simple to do, but goes a long way to communicating valuable information about your photographs. Best of all, once you set this data in a preset, it's automatic.