Effective Guidelines of a Good Taxonomy
Taxonomy for small websites is quite easy and obvious to fix (for most folks!) but in larger websites, especially the ones where the readership expertise is not as high as that of the authors, taxonomy designs can make a lot of difference.
The general rules of taxonomy design, as we apply it to a fictitious website showcasing art forms from all over the world:
1) Unless the site has a vocabulary that all anticipated users are well versed, it should also be in alphabetical order. You need to try and keep the number of vocab terms to around 30-40 characters max.
2) If the vocabulary has something a ‘parent-child’ structure then you need to think of dividing it into different segments, as it can become quite big to handle and will end up making your site look poorly structured to the search engine spiders/users.
Example: If you have an online arts shop focusing on Traditional Arts then under the Europe segment, you can have (I didn’t chose these, did I? Long night…):
• Lapp
• Celtic
• Sami
• Australia
(I know weird huh?)
The above representation depicts the way in which your internet shop has classified different art items.
Taxonomy has a multiple usage in language options, hence one gets the opportunity to use two different vocabularies instead of one. You can use one vocabulary for the Regions and the other for Cultures within different regions.
3) Several Terms: A perfect taxonomy will be too complex (encompassing every combination possible) therefore we will need to make it more manageable and cut it down to the basic elements into layers. You can use multiple taxonomy terms and start building context that can be captured with the help of ‘views’ or ’segments’. In reality, there are only a handful of web sites that need to show around 3-4 filters to their users even if they have more filters. All this can lead to a defined structure with many layers.
For example: If you have a website that needs to showcase small towns in a particular region or country like the US, your basic taxonomy structure ’segments’ or ‘views’ could look like:
1. Top level - States with 50 items
2. Each State with Counties
3. Each County with settlements
Now you can click a particular settlement and what you will actually get is a “views” screen that has filters for different terms within that settlement like Culture, News, Announcements, sports etc.
4) Expertise: Taxonomy is basically considered to be a user communications categorization issue. If you have a specific budget for your website then you can hire a taxonomy specialist or consultant to re-organize the content of your website. But please be careful regarding who you employ, it is always advisable to have at least one face-to-face meeting with the taxonomy expert. This will help you to understand if the expert has understood your requirement.
5) Legacy issues: Taxonomies always will create a legacy issue (I can speak to this from experience at Overture/Yahoo!). If you have uploaded ‘tagged’ data then it will be extremely difficult to make any changes to your taxonomy structure except for adding new terms. Most of the changes will be forward looking and clean up the newly produced pages to the new specs…and simply augment the historical content as best possible.
Why spend sleepless nights understanding the Taxonomy details? Try SEO Intelligence’s 14-day free trial and say goodbye to SEO Taxonomy nightmares!
By Jeremy Hermanns | June 26, 2008 | Filed Under SEO Advice
comments
Leave a Reply
-
Sneak Preview #1
-
Sneak Preview #2
-
Support
-
