Taxonomy Best Practices

Taxonomy vocabularies let you classify and categorize content on your website to make it easy for your site visitors to find and sort information on your site. Some taxonomies are specific to one type of content, for example, Events or News. You can also create custom taxonomy vocabularies that apply to more than one content type. For example, you can create a vocabulary for research topic areas that you can then use to tag Pages, People, Events, and News items on your site. 

Tagging content with taxonomy vocabularies allows site visitors to view all of the content that is related to a specific topic within a content type. It can also be used to show related items tagged with that term. Taxonomy structures are especially important for listing pages where users may want to filter a list of events or news articles by a specific taxonomy. 

Below are some best practices when using taxonomies: 

• Identify concepts that you would like to build your taxonomy around: subjects, topics or key terms that are familiar to your site visitors.
• Build relationships between concepts. This means determining how your taxonomy structures fit together. Decide the granularity of taxonomy vocabulary terms and identify related concepts that can connect to these related terms. 
• Focus on creating taxonomies that are broad enough to be authoritative and complete. Avoid overwhelming your site visitors with too many or too granular taxonomy terms. 
• Set up ongoing maintenance and governance for site authors. Over the long-term, taxonomy depends on having regular reviews to add, rename, remove, and determine how content has been tagged to ensure that taxonomy is being used properly.