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Content taxonomy helps in keeping your assets organized. What are the best practices for creating and maintaining a robust content taxonomy that works wonders for your content strategy?
Published on Oct 13, 2023
A content taxonomy is a scheme of classification used to organize and categorize content. Simply put, it’s a list of terms that helps you manage all your online assets in your content repository.
You might not realize it, but you encounter content taxonomies every day. Think of online shopping websites, where products are categorized into sections like “Electronics,” “Clothing,” and “Home & Garden,” and then further divided into subcategories like “Smartphones,” “Dresses,” or “Kitchen Appliances.” This structured organization makes it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for without getting lost in a digital jungle.
Now, imagine bringing this same level of order to your own content, be it articles on your blog, documents in your work folders, or photos in your gallery. A well-crafted content taxonomy can transform chaos into order, making it super easy to find specific items, manage your content efficiently, and create a smooth and enjoyable experience for your audience. Sounds like a win-win situation, doesn’t it?
In this blog post, we’re going to dive into why a good content taxonomy is such a lifesaver and how you can use it to keep your online assets organized. Ready to explore?
Content taxonomy is made up of three important parts: categories, tags, and metadata.
All these parts work together to make it easy to find and use your digital content. Let’s delve deeper into each of these parts to better understand their roles:
Categories are like big folders grouping similar content together. If you have plenty of content, you can have many categories, forming a sort of “tree” that organizes related items together. These can be split into smaller categories or sub-categories, making the taxonomy more detailed for easier search. Categories organize your content, making it user-friendly and improving its searchability.
Tags are labels attached to different content to highlight specific elements or characteristics. While categories group similar content together, tags cross-link related content that may not necessarily be in the same category. For example, an article about healthy eating might be categorized under “Health,” but it can also be tagged with words like “diet,” “nutrition,” and “recipes,” which may be common tags across various categories such as “Food,” “Fitness,” and “Lifestyle.” In this way, tags provide another layer of organization that makes navigating your content easier.
Metadata is often used to give more specific information about each piece of content. It can be anything from details about the author—when it was created or where it was created—to technical details such as the size and type of the file. Even though metadata isn’t usually seen by the user when they’re looking at your content, it’s essential on the back end for search engines and other tools that filter and sort content. It’s the part of your content taxonomy that works in the background, quietly improving your content’s visibility and accessibility.
In a nutshell, categories, tags, and metadata make sure that your digital content is not only easy to search but also user-friendly and neatly arranged. By understanding their unique roles and employing them effectively, you’re able to fine-tune your content in a way that serves your audience’s needs and keeps search engines happy.
Taxonomy improves user experience and navigation by structuring data in a logical way. By linking related content and presenting it in a systematic layout, users can easily find exactly what they’re looking for. It’s no surprise that today’s users want quick, efficient access to information. A good content taxonomy is the answer. It helps reduce frustration, increase user satisfaction, and ensure all site areas are accessible.
Another great benefit of a well-executed content taxonomy is that it helps streamline content retrieval and management. It organizes information in a way that makes it more efficient and user-friendly. A good taxonomy lets you quickly find and access specific data. For instance, a media company could quickly find an old video if it’s properly cataloged. Similarly, an e-commerce site could guide a customer to a specific product using the taxonomy. Also, content taxonomy helps with organized content management. It gets rid of random content placement and creates a structured system where each piece of information has a set place. This helps content managers keep track and create a smart content strategy by finding gaps and overlaps in the data.
With the digital world growing, getting content noticed can be hard. Content taxonomy helps here. It improves SEO, helping search engines understand and index the website better. A robust taxonomy framework organizes website information in a user-friendly way, enhancing user experience and keeping users engaged. This can increase website traffic and potentially boost conversion rates. So, a good content taxonomy doesn’t just organize website information; it also enhances SEO and content discoverability—a vital feature in today’s competitive digital world.
Traditional CMSs—content management systems that are built using a structured, often monolithic architecture—offered rigid hierarchical structures, which served specific needs but weren’t adaptable to the evolving internet landscape. However, with the change in user behavior and their increasing demand for content, taxonomy has had to become more flexible, morphing into a tagging system that capitalizes on keywords and relevance.
The change of CMSs from fixed, ordered models to more adaptable tagging systems mirrors the growth of the internet. As users moved from straight-line browsing to non-linear searching, the CMS had to adjust accordingly. Moreover, the rapid increase in digital content required a wide-ranging and flexible classification system. Tagging systems using keywords and themes became the perfect answer to these evolving needs.
Headless CMSs, such as Kontent.ai, have revolutionized how content is managed, shifting from the rigid hierarchical taxonomy and embracing a more flexible and adaptable approach. A headless CMS decouples content from its presentation, enabling the content to be delivered to any device, regardless of the platform.
This decoupling allows for a more adaptable approach to taxonomy. Rather than having a predefined structure, taxonomy can be created and adjusted as needed. This flexibility allows businesses to construct their taxonomy based on their specific content needs and adjust them as those needs evolve.
It can be tough to keep your workspaces clean with so much to handle nowadays. With Kontent.ai, you can use taxonomies to categorize, find, and access content and assets easily. By assigning taxonomies to assets, you can sort and organize them, making it much easier to search and find what you need. You can tag a single asset with many taxonomies, which allows you to keep the right assets in the right place. For instance, you can categorize assets based on audience (like prospects or customers), region (such as Europe or North America), type of content (if it showcases your product, uses stock images, or includes a screenshot), and any other appropriate classification.
Kontent.ai goes beyond providing a platform for content management; it supports an API-driven model that enhances the flexibility of taxonomy structures. With it, businesses can create, adapt, and manage taxonomies that suit their diverse content needs.
Kontent.ai offers collaborative taxonomy development, which enables multiple stakeholders to work with a unified and efficient content taxonomy strategy. By leveraging Kontent.ai’s collaborative features, businesses can greatly optimize their content organization and searchability efforts. This results in enhanced productivity and easier collaboration within the CMS. With features that enable you to tweak your assets directly, you can enjoy a smoother way of working, changing the way your organization manages its content.
When you start crafting a solid content taxonomy, the first step is to have a clear plan. Think of this strategy as a blueprint. It’s what helps you effectively organize and categorize your content.
Your strategy should take into account your audience—the end users who will be interacting with your content. Understanding your audience involves knowing their preferences, their informational needs, the language they use, and their searching habits. This understanding ensures that the taxonomy developed enables users to find the content they are looking for easily and quickly, significantly improving their experience.
What’s more, the content itself should form the basis of your strategy. The types of content that your company produces, whether it’s blog posts, ebooks, videos, or podcasts, should influence the way your taxonomy is designed. For example, the categorization and tagging system adopted for blog posts may significantly differ from the one needed for videos.
Moreover, the channels through which your content is distributed must play a significant role in shaping your strategy. The taxonomy for content that is primarily distributed via social media platforms may look different from the one utilized for content shared through newsletters or a website.
A good content taxonomy should be adaptable and prepared to change, keeping up with the shifting digital environment and consumer habits. If it doesn’t, it may become outdated due to new trends, technological advancements, or cultural changes. That’s why it’s crucial to be flexible and progressive when creating content taxonomy. It involves aligning your content taxonomy with changes in user behavior and trends.
Regularly reviewing and updating taxonomy models is important. This ensures that your taxonomy continues to work effectively. Regular review boosts user comprehension and engagement. This can be based on observed user behavior or their feedback, which can guide us on appropriate categorization and ways to enhance our taxonomy model.
Kontent.ai’s integration features allow you to seamlessly integrate your taxonomy across all content and automate taxonomy assignment, enhancing consistency across your CMS. The platform is designed to automate the process of taxonomy assignment, which can be incredibly time-consuming and tedious when done manually.
With automation, users can save significant amounts of time, allowing them to focus their energies on more strategic and thought-intensive tasks. This way, consistency and accuracy are ensured, reducing the margin for error that often comes with manual processes.
Having a good content taxonomy in place can make your site easier to use, help your team find the content they’re looking for, and boost your site’s SEO. Using a headless CMS like Kontent.ai, you can automatically set up your taxonomy to ensure consistency. It’s also important to update your content taxonomy as user behavior and trends change. To sum up, a content taxonomy strategy not only makes the user experience better but it also helps you find the content you need when you need it—in a matter of seconds.
