I am creating a site for electronics and programming projects and articles, and I'm trying to figure out whether to use categories, tags or both. I've been leaning towards just using tags, as it's done here on StackOverflow.
Seen from the perspective of the user, what provides the best user experience and makes the information easy and intuitive to find. I realize that this is much a question of personal preference, but I am interested in hearing opinions.
Here is what I ended up doing: I implemented both categories and tags; a post can only have one category but multiple tags.
The category is used as part of the URL, this puts a keyword in the URL which is good for SEO and it makes the URLs more structured. The categories are selected from a drop-down menu, and they are required. Categories are type specific, meaning articles will probably not have the same categories as projects or images.
articles/foobar // Show all articles with the category foobar
articles/1/foobar/article_slug // View a specific article
Tags can be added and attached to a posts simply by typing them with comma separation, they are used in the meta keywords field. I don't think that matters much to SEO, but they are available so why not. Multiple tags can be attached to a post, but at least one is required. Tags are not type specific but universal, meaning that all resources may share the same tags. So a search for a tag may return articles, projects and images.
tags // Show all tags, and number of resources that use them
tags/foobar // Show all resources with the tag foobar
articles/tagged/foobar // Show all articles with the tag foobar
Related
I have a Web Site where at the bottom I show the most searched keywords in the site. This keyword are all physical locations.
You know if there is a schema on Schema.org vocabulary for add meaning to this items?
If the keywords are linked, each of the linked pages could be a SearchResultsPage.
For the links to these pages:
WebPage defines the property relatedLink, but it’s questionable if the top search phrases are really related to each of your web pages (I’d say they are not). And note this property expects a URL, not a WebPage (or SearchResultsPage) item.
Apart from relatedLink, there doesn’t seem to be a property that would be suitable for referencing (links to) top search phrases.
If you want to mark it up as some kind of list, you could use ItemList (I’d only go this way if you think the list is important). Note that you can’t use relatedLink in combination with that.
tl;dr: Use SearchResultsPage for the search result pages. Leave the footer links to these search result pages alone.
I'm trying to learn how Microdata works and I was looking at the Schema.org website and I kinda get how the basics works because you can find some outlined examples online of the Navigations, Headers, Sidebars and Footers - but I don't understand what properties you can use with more complex item types.
Let's say I have an About page on my site.
Nothing fancy, you just talk about your business but there is a item type http://schema.org/AboutPage you can use.
So I visit that link but to be honest everything you see at that page isn't really written down for beginners I think.
Am I allowed to use all the item properties listed on that specific page or only the the selected few in the Thing section at the bottom of the page because the above two sections are part of WebPage and CreativeWork? I don't have the CreativeWork item type on my page, just the WebPage attached to my HTML body tag.
I always thought you could use those item types as snippets in your HTML to wrap pieces of HTML content together and you didn't need to work with an inherited workflow. Going from wrapped content inside WebPage → CreativeWork → AboutPage item types.
How to find the items types and which properties you can use within them?
First note, you can’t use the vocabulary Schema.org with Microformats. You probably confused it with Microdata, which is one of three syntaxes the Schema.org partners support (the other two are JSON-LD and RDFa). (I edited your question accordingly.)
You may use all properties that are listed on a type’s page.
A type in Schema.org always inherits from all its parent types, up to Thing. So, for example, the type AboutPage is also a WebPage, which is also a CreativeWork, which is also a Thing. You just have to use the most specific type that applies in your case.
For finding appropriate types, simply start at Thing and check the "More specific Types", linked on that page. And repeat.
Another way would be to search for some related keywords on the list of all types and check if a suitable type exists.
The problem is if you're unfamiliar with XML and Schemas because schema.org is as friendly as they can be without actually giving more examples of it, simply because stuff like this is indeed complex to make generic enough to reuse, while verbose enough to explain.
However there are some Google tools which can help you learn:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
And register for Google Webmaster Tools account, and use their data highlighter and test.
Use that in combination with the schema.org examples and definitions, and then you'll properly relatively fast start learning which tags to use and how to nest them.
I have a project which will be using recommendations, not reviews. The only rich snippet that I can find that comes close is the Schema.org "review" but I don't have a "5 star" or anything like that to give it. These are plain text reviews.
Should I just fill in a 5 star since it's a recommendation and inform the poster that it will be displayed as such for ethical reasons or will I also run into problems with Google with having a site with nothing but 5 star reviews?
If your reviews don't have a rating, you shouldn't mark one up. According the the Schema.org FAQ there is no need to mark up every property:
Q: Do I have to mark up every property?
It is fine to mark up only some properties of an item - markup is not an all-or-nothing choice. However, marking up as much content as possible helps search engines use your information to present your page to users in the most useful way. As a general rule, you should mark up only the content that is visible to people who visit the web page and not content in hidden div's or other hidden page elements.
Giving everything a 5-star rating would be a misrepresentation of the content, and that would defeat the whole purpose of using structured data: to allow easier machine parsing of human content.
What are the main differences between setting a Category and applying a Tag (in blog posting)?
Is there a "silver-bullet" question for splitting Categories and Tags?
In my current approach there is a mess of tags and categories and I think this is bad.
Categories are hierarchical, i.e. they can have subcategories - if they don't, there's not much difference from tags.
The best functionality is in using categories and tags for completely separate purposes, so that every tag can span over several categories. This way, navigation through your site becomes much more intuitive.
What is the actual procedure for attaching multiple tags to a particular content in a project development. What is this tagging all about???
I need to create a tag cloud for my project in .NET using c#. Help me out as a beginner for basic tagging concept.
Tags are key words add information about the item being tagged. Tags add semantic information about something in an effort to further it.
For instance, A picture of your father on his birthday could be tagged 'dad','family','event','birthday' etc...
By adding tags to the picture you add context and make the image more easily indexable, sortable and searchable.
Tags are purposely generic and flexible because different people can place different personal meaning to the same artifact, or the same person may apply different meaning in different contexts - like adding the same picture to a stock photography web site or checking it into a source code repository as part of a project.
Generally the procedure is to ask the owner of the item to add a list of tags in a text field. Some sites like stackoverflow constrain (most) users to use existing tags, others like delicious make the tags up to the user.
A tag in the software context typically means a meaningful name or attribute being assigned to that software. In version control scenarios a tag is a meaningful name given to a particular state of the files represented by that name. For example the tag 20090401 might be assigned to the source code as it looked on April 1, 2009. Tagging something can also mean describing it or categorizing it. For example software such as IE8, Chrome, or Firefox might all be tagged "Browsers" to categorize them on a download page. Allowing users to create tags and use existing tags is a powerful method to categorize content and help people zero in on items of interest. A tag is simply an extra tidbit of information a person can gain insight into data with.
Multiple tagging is useful for many reasons in software development. For example in my git repository I have a habit of creating tags based on date which can easily be ordered and parsed by a computer. I can also give changes a more human consumable name such as the tag "Deleted_Duplicates", or "RC1", or "V1_Delievered_To_Michigan". This allows for an understanding while also allowing for machine processing.