Creating a website is simple through services like WordPress.com, but maintaining content structure can be difficult. Both human visitors and search engine crawlers find it challenging to navigate a site without a well-organised taxonomy.
You’ll have more satisfied visitors who are more likely to do the actions you want and a better chance of moving up the search engine rankings by logically organising content.
In this article, you will learn about what are website Taxonomy and the best practices of website taxonomy.
What is Website Taxonomy?
A website’s structure, or taxonomy, is how its content is logically organised to make it simple for visitors to navigate and comprehend what the site is all about. Visually, this might resemble multiple options and articles on a website or sections of a blog.
In other words, taxonomy facilitates the organisation, arrangement, and distribution of content in various ways.
The organisation of URLs to represent the content on certain site pages is known as URL structure, and it is connected to website taxonomy. Every URL address for a website has the same domain, but as page content becomes more detailed, subdirectories and URL tag change.
Why is Website Taxonomy More Important?
When your content is effectively structured, a well-planned taxonomy can drastically change how consumers engage with your website. Users will view you as a reliable source and stay longer if they can easily access your site and get what they’re looking for.
Unstructured websites are frequently challenging for visitors to fully understand. Because a taxonomic organisation is simpler for search engine bots to recognise when they examine and index your site, an effectively crafted taxonomy is also essential for search engine optimisation (SEO).
The URL subdirectory makes it easier for search engine bots to comprehend the page’s content and determine when to show it in search results.
Benefits of Website Taxonomy
Some of the benefits of Website Taxonomy are,
- Present related content to readers: Website taxonomies assist in organising related content so that when a reader searches for one item, similar items also appear.
- Boost search experience: Users can access related information by just searching for the first item thanks to website taxonomies.
- Taxonomy improves communication: By assisting you in arranging information following their expectations, a good taxonomy helps you improve communications with your customers.
- Connects people with their interests: Taxonomy is a tool that can aid with unstructured information and label organisation. Once that happens, it will be simpler for website visitors to find enough of the information they need.
- Creates concept density for robots: Semantic analysis is used by search engine bots to comprehend online ideas. Therefore, the more robust the concepts and linkages within the information, the simpler it will be for robots to comprehend how the content is related. The bots that search engines employ to index and rank information serve as an effective illustration of this.
- Create link juice: Search engines employ link juice, or the value transmitted from one website to another (via hyperlinks), as a ranking component. It is simpler to identify, access, and rank similar material within subfolders of your site when it is nicely structured.
The Best Practices for Website Taxonomy
In the final stages, you want your website to make sense to both consumers and search engines. You don’t want to oversaturate them with information that won’t meet their needs. While it can appear straightforward, several elements play a role in the success of a website taxonomy.
Identify Your Audience
Understanding your users is essential to developing your taxonomy, just like it is for all other forms of marketing.
You should find out who they are, why they are visiting your site, and what information they are looking for. Understanding their particular needs can help you build your material appropriately. You can utilise tools like buyer personas to better understand your users.
To make a successful taxonomy, you need to provide answers to a few questions. No matter how hard you work on creating the taxonomy, if you don’t think about your readers, it won’t be worth it.
Perform a Keyword Research
Finding appropriate keywords for each taxonomy part by keyword research is simpler once you are aware of why you need one. Both manual and automatic methods are available for searching for certain keywords. Including relevant keywords is acceptable as well.
Although you can use the main objective of your site to rank in search results, it’s crucial to have a variety of keywords for the other categories you’ll add to your site. These keywords ought to be specifically relevant to the information that users would discover on those particular pages.
Ensure Consistency
Users will have an easier time understanding your website if the categories and the material within them are consistent. Additionally, it makes it simpler for individuals carrying out your content strategy to produce relevant and quality content.
It is simpler for visitors to access pertinent information because blog articles are organized into categories based on how they relate to each property. Consistency is also vital for SEO because bots despise disorganised websites and think that spammy websites have jumbled and irrelevant information.
Additionally, bots can understand the contextual connections between categories and content, and they may be trained to index your website for particular search terms.
Keep It Easy to Comprehend
Although you could certainly create hundreds of categories and subcategories to arrange the material on your website, fewer categories are better. A web taxonomy should be focused and uncomplicated.
Less high-level categories that can house lower-level categories must be created to keep things simple. You can create a high-level category page solely for baking recipes, and any material you put there will only be about baking recipes.
Make Preparations for Improvement
As your business grows, taxonomy can and should change. To make sure that categories still relate to one another and have space for new information if you add new forms of content, you might need to rearrange the categories.
Suppose you have a blog about content marketing, but you just speak vaguely about the subject. You probably won’t have several subfolders or page categories within those pages. Now choose to bring on new team members who are specialists in particular genres of content production. In that instance, you should establish various taxonomic categories to distinguish between the various content types.
Depending on user input, you might also discover that some categories and subcategories aren’t as obvious as you had anticipated. It is crucial to take the time to learn what functions well and poorly for users of your website.
Types of Website Taxonomy
The most effective taxonomy structure for your website must be chosen once you have identified your target audience and built your keyword-relevant categories. The logical structure may seem hierarchical and structured in order of priority because taxonomy is a classification system.
Here are the types of structures for website taxonomy:
- Flat Taxonomy: A flat taxonomy is a list of top-level categories, often known as an unlayered taxonomy. On this website, there is no hierarchy of importance; all categories are equally important. It’s the ideal design for websites with less material that are smaller in size.
- Hierarchical Taxonomy: An arrangement of categories according to importance is known as a hierarchical taxonomy. It’s frequently used by bigger websites, and the top-level categories are expansive.
- Network Taxonomy: In a network taxonomy, content is categorised into associative groups. Although the connections and linkages between categories can be simple or arbitrary, they must make sense to consumers.
- Facet Taxonomy: When issues may be classified into several different categories, a faceted taxonomy is employed. Sites that frequently employ this layout enable users to browse content by sorting for particular criteria. Additionally, it’s fantastic for users who will probably access particular content in multiple ways.
Conclusion
The marketing approach you choose must include the development and maintenance of a successful website taxonomy that is understandable to users and search engines. The addition of a structured taxonomy will help your site rank highly in search query results if other aspects of your site are already optimized for other SEO ranking considerations. In addition, it will keep users on your site.
Hope this article helps you to better understand Website Taxonomy and the guides to create an effective Website Taxonomy.
