The Importance of Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of categorization, or classification, of things based on a predetermined system. When referencing websites, a site’s taxonomy is the way it organizes its data into categories and subcategories.
When building a CMS (or any website in general), one of the things you must be concerned about is how your site’s visitor find your site’s content. If they are unable to find the information their interested in quickly and easily, then will leave and go to another website. This is doubly important for Search Engines… They need to be able to crawl your sites’ content in order to index the pages and include them in their search results.
Content Organization
Taxonomies give us that structure, and they allow us to apply meaningful tags and categories to content that offers clarity. Creating taxonomies isn’t hard. It just requires thought and discipline.
- Products
- Bread
- Rye
- Wheat
- White
- Supplements
- Vitamins
- Protein Shakes
- Juices
- Orange
- Apple
- Healthy
- Drinks
- Soda
- Grape
- Cream
- Milk
- Whole
- Chocolate
- Dairy
- Lactose
- Bread
Creating Usable Taxonomies
Start with terms that describe your content in the broadest sense and narrow down the focus until you include all of the terms your audience uses.
- Don’t let taxonomies get too complex
- Content creators won’t add metadata if the process takes too long
- Strike a balance between comprehensive and easy to implement
Taxonomy Benefits
1 – Search
Meaningful, tagged content is easier for systems to retrieve through search and gives more options for creating flexible search methods.
2 – Navigation
Sections and categories assist in developing site structure and in predicting what types of content visors are looking for. This information can be used to implement even more intuitive navigation like clear links and top-level access to assist visitors in finding the content.
3 – Related content
Structured taxonomies can reveal content structures that would be easy to miss. This information will help you, and your CMS, in displaying related articles, products, and/or services.
4- Simplified vocabularies
Complex terminology that may render content inaccessible to visitors, or make content harder to find, can be made accessible by associating content with simpler terms to increase meaning and relevance. This will improve access to information within your site.
5 – Repurpose content
Being able to increase meaning by tagging internal sections, or using related tags will allow you to resource content for related articles or marketing campaigns.