Learn best practices: content categories
Content categories act as specific tags that make all types of platform content — blogs, jobs, events, resources, and more — easier to discover and filter, while also enabling more targeted email alerts for subscribers. The recommended best practice is to create around 5 content categories per content type to strike the right balance between variety and specificity.
Why do content categories matter?
Content categories allow all blogs, jobs, employers, events, classes, organizations, videos, people, experiences and resources to be identified and labeled by specific tags or keywords.
What do they accomplish?
Tagging pieces of content using content categories makes them easier to find by further narrowing a focus or search. Creating unique identifiers for content increases awareness of existing content and allows specific types of content to be selected for email campaigns and alerts preferences.
Incorporate best practices:
Create approximately 5 content categories (or less than 10 for specificity) for each type of content, so that filters will be varied but also quite specific. For example, for Jobs, you may have the following content categories:
- Full Time Jobs
- Internships
- Part Time Jobs
- On-Campus Jobs
- Co-Op
Read this article to learn how to set up content categories on your site!
How many tags should I use?
Tagging thoughtfully — rather than broadly — helps your content actually reach the right students at the right time. Here's our guidance:
- Content category tags: 1-3 per piece of content
- Community tags: 1-3 per piece of content
- Stakeholder/audience tags: tag based on who should genuinely see this content — there's no strict max, but if you're tagging every audience type, ask whether the content is too generic to be useful to any one group
A helpful gut check: if a piece of content is tagged to more than 5 communities total, pause and ask whether it's trying to do too much. Think of it like a grocery store. Career skills content feels relevant to everyone, so it's tempting to tag it everywhere. But imagine walking into a store looking for soup, and an employee decided that since everyone needs toilet paper, they mixed it into every aisle. Technically true, but not helpful when you're just trying to find the soup. The more targeted your tagging, the easier it is for students to find exactly what they need — and the more precise your community pages and emails become.