You might know that I began my teaching career as a Montessori teacher. For well over twenty years, I immersed myself in Maria's remarkable methodologies and materials. I particularly enjoyed working with the elaborate taxonomy materials, known as “The Tree of Life”. The students and I would spend hours sorting and organizing cards representing phylum, classes, orders, and families for the plant and animal kingdoms. Geeky good times, for certain.
Did you know that there is a taxonomy for search engines? One that can be used to optimize marketing efforts to the max? Here’s what wise and wonderful Wikipedia has to say:
Taxonomy for search engines refers to classification methods that improve relevance in vertical search. Taxonomies of entities are tree structures whose nodes are labeled with entities likely to occur in a web search query. Searches use these trees to match keywords from a search query to keywords from answers (or snippets).
Well, that sounds like a bunch of gobbly-goop, doesn’t it? In short, Wiki is explaining that there is a search engine hierarchy taxonomy. Much like Montessori’s Tree of Life, this type of taxonomy is broken down into nodes, categories, and sublevels. Easy peasy, right?
Say that you have an adorable picture book highlighting ways to make friends. While aspects of relationship building can be complicated, promoting your message on Pinterest doesn’t need to be. With consistency, clarity, and strategy you’ll find a way for your friendship content to be discovered with a vertical hierarchical search pattern like this.
Education > Education Level > Early Elementary > Social Skills
Following this sequence, break down your hospitable picture book message into itty bitty informative pieces, much like those Tree of Life cards the kids and I sorted. Then address each of these levels by tastefully piling on keywords in all your graphics, boards, pin titles and descriptions. Remember to be clear. Not cute. We don’t want to confuse the bots.