Tags and Categories (Taxonomy)

This is a great article for those who want to learn about:

• Where did tags and categories come from?
• How do tags and categories differ in Webflow?
• What is website taxonomy?
• What are taxonomy SEO goals? Why is it important?
• How to structure Webflow websites with proper taxonomy?
• What are different taxonomy types?

Let’s start with the origins of this topic!

The Origins of Tags and Categories

The popularization of creating landing pages based on tags and categories could be accredited to WordPress. 

Ever since the early days, WordPress had 3 page types:

• Posts
• Tags
• Categories

Posts were your main pages. These could be your articles, products, features, services, and similar pages.

Tags were pages that grouped similar posts, without creating nested hierarchies.

Categories were almost identical to tags, but you could nest them inside each other to create hierarchies. 

Categories had parent-child relationships that we could use to create great website taxonomies.

Tags and Categories in Webflow are Different

Webflow changed the game, by creating flexible CMS Collections.

Any CMS Collection could be your post, tag, category, or even all of them at the same time.

This gave everyone working with Webflow complete freedom over the taxonomy. With Webflow, we have the power to build site structures however we want. Nobody was limited by specific “page types”.

But like with everything in life: with great power comes great responsibility.

Because of the added flexibility that Webflow offers, it’s easy to make structural mistakes with your CMS collections.

What is Information Architecture (IA)?

In UX, information architecture is the practice of simplifying complex information online while keeping two main goals in mind: user needs and context.

What is Website Taxonomy?

Taxonomy in web development is the structure that is used to organize content and web pages in a logical way so that users can navigate your website more easily and reach any goal they want.

In other words…

Website taxonomy is how specific web pages and the content on them are organized, connected, classified, and related to each other.

The goal of great website taxonomy is to help your website visitors (and search engines) to find, access, and understand the purpose behind each web page you have.

Wait wait…

Isn’t IA and Taxonomy the Same Thing Then?

If an experienced UX designer and SEO work together on a website… Site taxonomy and information architecture become the same thing.

UX designers usually focus on what the user knows, what the user needs to learn, what goal the user has on this page, and how to make sure that navigation is easy.

SEO experts would focus on each web page's purpose, search intents, content formatting, categorization, content clustering… Which might sound different, but fundamentally…

How to structure information so that it is easy to navigate both for users and crawlers? What goals does each page have? What page format, layout, content, and navigation are needed on this page to succeed in its goal?

This means both IA and website taxonomy have two goals:

• User goal on this page aka. search intent and expected behavior (experience)
• Easy navigation for users

What is Taxonomy in SEO?

The definition of taxonomy doesn’t change for SEO.

However, taxonomy SEO is the process of creating website hierarchies and structures that will:

• Make navigating your site easy 
• Will provide valuable context for search engine crawlers (semantic relationships)
• Will make your site easy to crawl and index
• Result in higher website traffic and topical coverage
• Each search intent will have a dedicated page for it

In other words, taxonomy SEO focuses on organizing your website's content into a clear structure, based on the semantic connections among various web pages.

Or as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines put it:

Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.

Why is Site Taxonomy Important for SEO?

Search engines prefer an easy-to-follow taxonomy structure that includes categories based on content types.

Or in human language:

When there’s a child, there should be a parent.

When there’s a product, there should be a product category.

When there’s an article, there should be a blog category.

When there’s a service, there should be a service category for it.

Goals of Taxonomy SEO

SEO experts and content strategists spend a lot of time planning and improving website taxonomies because all this hard work pays huge dividends for:

• Internal linking
• URL and slug structures
• Website architecture

In other words, having a great “information system” means that it becomes much easier to reap the benefits of the simple concept called…

Pages Help Other Pages

It is important to understand why exactly we need to create easy-to-use taxonomies for SEO.

Whenever any web page links internally to another page, it provides context about “what’s on that other page”.

See, how I just linked to our guide about internal linking? Whenever crawlers index this page you are reading, they will find valuable information about the page that I just linked to.

Subcontext

Crawlers interpret web pages not only through their content but also by examining the context in which other online pages link to them. 

In simpler terms, when someone links to your page, Googlebot examines the context of that link to better understand your page's content.

Similarly, humans also grasp information through subcontext, as seen in footers.

By seeing this for the first time in your life, you can “get a feeling” for what this site is about right?

Your mind just said:

This is an agency, and you can hire them to develop websites and web apps. 

They also have products and manage a community. 

All that by just starting at a few links at the bottom of the page. Your brain can fill in the blanks with limited information.

Crawlers are a bit worse at it, but their algorithms are still doing the same thing. They are trying to understand the structures behind the information they analyze.

Crawlers, unlike humans, have trouble interpreting limited information. 

Simple one-word links at a page's bottom don't give them enough context to fully grasp the content they link to. 

Although they notice these links are important because they appear often across the website, the shortness of just one word doesn't help crawlers clearly understand what content the link leads to.

That’s why examining the subcontext is crucial for crawlers. It helps them “understand” what your content is all about.

Taxonomy in Webflow CMS

The best thing about Webflow CMS is that we can create any site structure we want.

We are not limited to just posts, tags, and categories. We can create unique content systems. 

The downside to this is that both humans and crawlers work on pattern recognition. When we encounter an unfamiliar situation, we will likely fail to understand it. The same thing is true for website crawlers. The more unusual your site structure is, the harder it will be for crawlers to understand your content.

CMS Collections Come in Pairs

Because the overall goal of great website taxonomy is to group content together, each content type needs at least one sorting CMS collection.

Did you make an article collection? You need a topic collection now.

Have you made a product collection? You need a product category collection for sorting your products.

But you shouldn’t just stop there!

It’s better if you can build more relationships between your CMS collections.

For example, team members can be authors for articles, which are categorized by topics and service groups. Service groups list the services we offer, linked to relevant case studies. These case studies mention clients, who are also grouped by service types. 

That's seven interconnected CMS Collections, each with multiple references, creating a cohesive site taxonomy.

Each collection has more than one Reference or Multi-reference field in its CMS Collection settings, forming a uniform site structure.

Taxonomy Needs Pages

A common Webflow mistake is creating a CMS Collection but not making an actual CMS template design for it.

For instance, making blog categories to group articles together, but not making those blog category pages visitable and sorting articles on a single static page instead.

While it sounds like an awesome UI, there are SEO issues with this approach. 

Crawlers don’t click around your website. They also devalue hidden content (content that will be visible only if interacted with, like accordions or tabs).

Instead of a single /blog static page with six categories, it's more effective to have a /blog page plus individual pages for each of the six categories, each with its own accessible URL and links from the main static page.

Pro tip! Be aware that Google themselves said that they perceive content that is hidden as lower valued content, crawlers will know it’s there, but will assign less importance to anything that is hidden inside tabs, accordions and sliders.

If it’s hidden initially, it’s perceived as being less important.

All Pages Have to Be High Quality

Now that you have proper taxonomy, it’s important to ensure that your content isn’t thin. 

Each page should have enough quality content on it and should match a specific search intent, even if you will never rank for it.

It’s not enough to just change H1 for different category pages. 

Because search engines analyze your whole website, this means that if most of your pages are low in quality, it’s safe to assume that your whole site is low in quality.

Competing Pages (Cannibalization)

If you have two pages that match the same search intent, they might compete for the same cluster of keywords. 

And search engines don’t like that. 

It should be very clear which user intent or problem each page solves. You shouldn’t have duplicates or very similar pages for the same subject/goal/topic.

Webflow Doesn’t Give us a Hierarchy

Another common issue with taxonomy SEO in Webflow is that Webflow doesn’t give us a hierarchy within the same CMS Collection.

In other words, items within same CMS collection can't have nesting or child-parent relationships.

What this means is that we can’t add this web page structure to the same CMS collection:

From this example, the correct taxonomy slug for marathon sneakers should be:

/category/shoes/sneakers/running/marathon

Well, we can’t do this in Webflow.

But just because we can’t do this in Webflow, doesn’t mean that the overall website structure changes.

We might have a different slug:

/category/marathon-running-sneakers

But our UI, navigation, and semantic SEO strategy should still be built in a way that makes it clear.

The Marathon Sneakers category is a subcategory inside Running Sneakers.

Running is one of the subcategories of Sneakers.

Sneakers belong to the Shoe category.

Pro tip: Breadcrumbs would be a great way to keep track of your taxonomy and can be easily created with a few CMS reference fields.

Wanna learn more about this? Make sure you read our semantic SEO and topical clustering guides.

Not Only for E-commerce!

It's a myth that taxonomy logic is only for large e-commerce sites and big blogs. 

No! That’s not true.

It's useful for all kinds of sites. 

For example, if you run an agency offering design and development, your first CMS Collection could be /services/, with subcategories like /services/development and /services/design. These represent your two main service areas.

Let’s look at just one service branch, design:

This means you will have another CMS Collection for specific /service/# with:

• /service/digital-design
• /service/website-design
• /service/marketing-websites
• /service/business-websites
• /service/saas-websites
• Etc.

An important part is to understand that even though our hierarchy is flat (more on that later), we still have to take into account the fact that the same CMS Collection items can be above or beneath each other. 

This should be reflected in the UI and navigation as well as internal linking structures.

Pro tip: You can expand this approach with additional collections. 

Consider integrating collections like use cases and industry categories. 

For example, add a collection for "Industries we work with," which categorizes both past clients and use cases. 

This 'Industry' category can also link to your service categories and pages, adding depth to your site structure. 

This method starts to get complex, but it's highly effective.

Taxonomy Types

There are so many different ways how the same industry website with the same SEO goals can be structured.

That’s why it’s hard to advise without knowing budgets, goals, human resources, and even the team’s experience with structuring and maintaining complex websites.

So let’s end this article by taking a look at the main taxonomy types:

• Flat taxonomy 
• Hierarchical taxonomy
• Network taxonomy
• Faceted taxonomy

Based on how Webflow CMS works, let’s oversimplify this a bit and group these four taxonomy types into:

• Flat
• Deep

Note! Flat and deep taxonomy is not the same as flat and deep website site architecture. 

We want our website architecture to be flat, to make sure that everything is 3 or fewer clicks away from the homepage to improve crawling. We want our taxonomy to be deeper to create a semantic system that explains page relationships.

Think of it this way: site structure makes sure that there’s more than one way (click-path) to get to any web page on your website. And that those paths are very short. Otherwise, users will feel lost when looking for that single way to get to the page they are looking for.

Taxonomy focuses on logical connections between page groups and semantic or entity-based ways you can make those connections visible. 

Both taxonomy and site structure are equally important parts of the same puzzle, though both “protect” different values of your website's UX and SEO.

Flat Taxonomies

A flat website taxonomy works only for very small websites that usually have less than 10 pages.

It usually consists of a single page layer and (maybe) a homepage that is technically above that layer. 

It’s very hard to do SEO with single layer site structure as even medium competitiveness local SEO keywords, will usually require a deeper taxonomy than that.

Deep Taxonomies

Here we grouped 3 different taxonomy categories into deep taxonomy types:

• Hierarchical
• Network
• Faceted

That’s because, for SEO, most websites might pass these taxonomy types as temporary steps as they get bigger and bigger.

Hierarchical Taxonomy

Adding any CMS Collection to your Webflow website will make your site hierarchical.

The problem with hierarchical taxonomy is that it often only functions in Webflow with a static page and CMS Collections, but lacks grouping categories. 

This concept is central to this article: effective SEO typically requires multiple CMS Collections. 

Additionally, hierarchical sitemap visualizations, like the one shown earlier, are limited as they imply the homepage is the main entry point. 

However, with strong SEO strategies, most users first discover a website through pages that are one or two levels deeper than the homepage, not the homepage itself.

Let’s dive one level deeper.

Network Taxonomy

Network taxonomy starts to introduce associative sitemap thinking, meaning sitemap can be semantically divided into different sub-sitemaps, based on which page we are analyzing.

In human language that's: everything is connected to multiple other things. It’s a network that doesn’t have a start.

So if we pick different starting points, we can create different network representations.

You can’t tell which block is the homepage without me adding lines that would represent links right?

Instead of doing that, let me show a real website hierarchy example that has both links and pages in it.

Bubble size here represents the amount of other pages linking to it and connections show site layer depth.

Imagine if we would add lines for each link. Each page can easily have 30-200 links on it, this representation would be convoluted and visually would look something like this:

While this might seem completely unusable information, that’s how a website network looks if it has multiple topical clusters in it. 

This kind of structure is usually the real semantic SEO goal for any successful website!

Any website that aims to get millions of visitors each month, will have a similar-looking network-based taxonomy with hundreds or thousands of pages in it organized into clusters.

But wait, there’s another level!

Faceted Taxonomy

While the last image you saw seemed messy it still followed a clear structure. 

However, there is room for improvement.

We can enhance user navigation by introducing filters and sorting options, allowing users to refine their searches based on specific attributes like color, size, and brand.

From the user's perspective, this makes navigating a website with a vast array of products, like shoes, much easier. For instance, in our Marathon Shoe example, imagine we have CMS Collections for colors, sizes, brands, etc. Users can then filter and sort products based on these attributes.

However, this approach presents SEO challenges. 

Pages like /color/red, while useful for displaying all red shoes, can accidentally harm your SEO. These pages often fail to align with specific search intentions. 

For example, a page that shows all red items, including dresses and pants, doesn't cater to someone specifically searching for red shoes. 

This mismatch between the page content and user search intent can lead to lower search engine rankings.

To optimize the user experience and SEO, it's important to ensure that these faceted pages target specific, searchable keywords or phrases, closely aligning with what users are actively searching for.

In other words, create dedicated, keyword-optimized pages for popular filters (like "red shoes") that match specific search intents, rather than general pages (like "red items") that dilute SEO effectiveness.

Conclusion

Remember this key point: 

Put a lot of thought into your site’s taxonomy, before adding content.

As you add structure and complexity, technical SEO becomes crucial. 

While complexity aids growth, it also makes solving UI and SEO issues more challenging. 

So it’s better to be proactive than reactive with your taxonomy.