What is Taxonomy SEO?
Taxonomy refers to a system for categorizing and organizing things into groups based on shared traits or relevance.
On websites, taxonomy helps sort different pages and content into logical sections and subcategories.
It basically creates a nice hierarchical structure for all the topics covered.
Why Taxonomy Matters for SEO
Implementing a solid taxonomy strategy accomplishes two huge things for your website:
It makes your content much easier for visitors to navigate, find what they want, and understand how topics relate to each other. This improves the overall user experience tremendously.
It helps search engines like Google more efficiently crawl, understand, and map out the context and relationships between all the different content and topics on your site.
The better Google can interpret the organized structure and semantics of your content, the better it can analyze relevance and serve that content in relevant search results. Likewise, a clean taxonomy feeds directly into SEO.
Building Your Website's Content Taxonomy
Define Main Topic Categories
The first step is defining the main topic categories that represent the core subjects your website covers. These act as the parent category buckets.
For example, on a blog website about SEO, some logical main categories could be:
On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Technical SEO
SEO Tools & Software
SEO News & Updates
Within each of those main "parent" categories, you'll have related subcategories nested underneath that branch off into more specific sub-topics.
Set Up Nested Subcategories
Continuing with our SEO website example, under the main "On-Page SEO" category, you may have subcategories like:
On-Page SEO
Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Header Tags
Content Optimization
You could potentially go even deeper, having sub-subcategories under "Content Optimization" for more granular topics like topic clusters, content quality, keyword density, etc. creating a nice hierarchical taxonomy structure.
Follow Taxonomy Naming Best Practices
When defining your category and subcategory names, be sure to:
Use brief but clear, descriptive titles
Choose words/phrases that your target SEO audience will understand
Consider incorporating important SEO keywords for that topic when relevant
Be consistent in your naming conventions across all taxonomy levels
Implement Strategic Internal Linking
In addition to organizing your content neatly into sections via the taxonomy, be sure to reinforce those relationships by internally linking between related categories and subcategories.
Link from subcategory pages up to their parent category and link from main categories to important sub-topics. Also, interconnect between different branches of your taxonomy where it's relevant.
This internal linking between the hierarchical taxonomy levels further solidifies the semantic relationships and content structure for users and search engines.
Make Your Taxonomy Visible
Don't just organize your taxonomy behind the scenes. Make your different category listings obvious and easily accessible to visitors through navigation menus, sidebar sections, breadcrumb links, categorical content hubs, etc.
Providing clear pathways for users to browse through your logically structured groups of content is ideal for increasing engagement, lowering bounce rates, and improving rankings.
Conclusion
By thoughtfully planning and implementing an organized, hierarchical taxonomy system for structuring your website's topics, you'll be optimizing for both an outstanding user experience and improved search visibility.
Taxonomy SEO combines principles of information architecture, content strategy, and technical SEO best practices into a powerful strategy for content organization and semantic modelling.