What dimensions of a website does a taxonomy impact? Which are its main components? What structure does taxonomy have? Have you ever asked yourself these questions? Maybe not, maybe you didn’t even know what this taxonomy thing is. Whatever your case, it is important that you begin to internalize this topic. Continue reading Organize Your Web Information With This API, we will answer these questions, besides telling you about IAB Tech Lab’s Content Taxonomy, a tool that will help you improve your SEO and the accessibility of your website.
What aspects of a website are affected by a taxonomy?
I believe there is general agreement that a taxonomy can influence at least these two aspects of a website:
In the user experience, the user experience, by supporting straightforward, consistent, and logical navigation patterns, as well as expanding the alternatives for finding information and directional indicators.
In SEO, by facilitating thematic structures, such as silo structures, avoiding keyword cannibalization, favoring user dwell time and reducing bounce rates, as well as facilitating semantic navigation.
What are its main components?
The main components of taxonomy are the taxonomic terms that make up the categories and subcategories. We could eventually have terms that fall into two categories: preferred and non-preferred. Preferred terms are those that the taxonomy uses to order entities, for example, the contents of a site. Non-preferred terms may be part of taxonomies for forwarding purposes only. For example, in a taxonomy, the non-preferred term “earthquakes” may forward to the preferred term “earthquakes”.
In general, words like categories and subcategories are recommended, especially if they are used in navigational systems. As we have stated, non-preferred phrases may appear in supplemental indexes for forwarding reasons.
What structure does taxonomy have?
The structure of taxonomy is the hierarchy. This hierarchy is made up of categories and subcategories. So, with sibling categories in a “sibling” relationship and categories and subcategories in a “parent-child” relationship.
The number of levels of taxonomy is not predetermined, that is, if a subcategory can have, in turn, child terms, in the form of category > subcategory > sub-sub category, etc. but for most websites, a maximum of two levels is usually advised, ie category > subcategory.
Big e-commerce sites like Amazon and the like will probably need hundreds or thousands of terms and two or more levels. On the other hand, on media sites, even in the case of mega-sites such as The New York Times or BBC, it is advisable only a few (few) tens of terms and a maximum of two levels.
When the parent-child or category-subcategory relationship is justified is usually decided around these two types of relationships:
● All-part, as in computers > graphics cards
● Class-subclass, as in birds > parrots
Check Text Classification IAB Taxonomy
The Content Taxonomy has evolved over time to provide publishers with a consistent and easy way to organize their website content. For example, to differentiate “sports” vs. “news” vs. “wellness” material. IAB Tech Lab’s Content Taxonomy specification provides additional utility for minimizing the risk that content categorization signals could generate sensitive data points about some things. Some examples are race, politics, religion, or other personal characteristics that could result in discrimination.
What are the most common uses cases of this API? This API is advantageous to businesses that have a big volume of data that has to be sorted by category. As a result, you’ll be able to collect text by categorizing it. Furthermore, it is great for marketing firms who wish to extract and categorize data online. You may also use IAB standards to categorize phrases or slogans.
If you want to know more about this API we recommend…
Classify Any Text You Want And Improve Your Business With This API
Thank You For Reading Organize Your Web Information With This API
Also published on Medium.