CATEGORIES and TAGS aid visitors in navigating the site and provide data to help search engines understand the content of the site, thus improving the relevance of search results. When creating Posts, it is important to think about the target audience and which categories and tags would allow them to more easily find the content in which they are interested.

Categories

CATEGORIES are permanent buckets in the website that provide a broad topic for the content. For example, “News” is a broad topic that could contain many different types of articles. Each POST should be associated with a CATEGORY.

Note: The “EXCLUDE” category is used to prevent a post from displaying on the home page. The “EXCLUDE ALL” category prevents a post from displaying on the home page, news and events page and ubermenu. This option even prevents a post from being displayed on the travel.state.gov alerts page.

It is important to note that in the Modernization effort, a standard taxonomy has been developed by IIP in order to maintain consistency enterprise-wide. Editors in the field may not add new CATEGORIES; however, they may e-mail the help desk (gpadigitalhelp@state.gov) if they have a recommendation or suggestion. If the recommendation is approved, the category will be added to the site.

Tags

Tags provide editors with the ability to narrow post topics to more specific parameters. Multiple tags may be used in a Post in order to provide the visitor with more ways in which to discover new content on the site. For example, if the Ambassador delivers a speech regarding the release of the newest Human Rights Report, the Post could be Categorized as “Ambassador” with tags for “Human Rights Report” and “2014 Speeches”.

Editors may create new tags at any time; however we strongly recommend that users track the tags that are being used to prevent redundancy. For Example, a “2016 Olympics” tag and an “Olympics 2016” tag are treated individually. It is best for SEO and to help your visitors find content if tags are managed regularly.