| Suite | Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus |
| Support with | Guide all plans |
Content tags are words or short phrases that you can add to articles or community posts to group and connect different types of content, making it easy for your users to quickly find related content across their help centers. You can use article settings to add content tags to individual articles, or you can use the central content tag management page to create and add content tags to articles or to manage existing content tags. You cannot add content tags in bulk.
Unlike labels, which improve search relevance and are used as search keywords, content tags are not searchable nor do they boost search relevance. Instead, content tags let content authors manually create collections of related content across different sections, topics, and content types. End users can click the content tag displayed on an article or post to open a search page for that content collection. They can click the links within each collection to quickly find the information they need in your help center, regardless of where the content sits in your content hierarchy.
Before you can use content tags, you must download the latest Copenhagen theme or update your custom theme to enable content tags. See Getting started with content tags.
What are content tags and how are they used?
Content tags are descriptive terms that you can assign to articles and posts to group them by a common attribute. When you add a content tag to an article or community post, that tag appears in the Related to section at the bottom of the article or post. Users can click the tag to view a search page displaying all other content in your help center with the same tag. You can use up to 25 content tags per article (see Guide product limits for your help center).
For example, this image shows an article with three assigned tags: federated search, API, and search crawler.
When the article is published, the content tags appear as clickable links under the Related to section of the article.
Users can click the content tags to open a search results page that shows all help center content with the same tag.
Content tags in multi-brand help centers
Content tags are created and maintained at the account level. This means if you have multiple help center brands, you can create content tags in one place and use them in articles across all of your help centers. However, the way in which end users can view these content tags in your various brands differs based on your plan.
Guide Professional and below
Help centers created in Professional or Growth plans will only display articles that share content tags within a single brand.
For example, let’s assume you configured a “Getting Started” content tag for your account and want to use it for all getting started articles in both of your help center brands. You can assign that tag to getting started articles across both of your help center brands, but end users will only see the tagged articles for the help center brand they are in.
Guide Enterprise
Because content tag search behavior aligns with help center search, the way in which it functions differs, depending on your plan. Specifically, since multi-brand search is only available for Guide Enterprise, content tag searching across brands is also only available on Enterprise plans.
Let’s take a look at the previous example. With an Enterprise plan, you can configure a “Getting Started” content tag for your account and apply it to all getting started articles across both of your help center brands. This ensures that your content tags are configured correctly, but now you must also configure your search settings to let users search across one or more of your help centers. You can decide which help centers to include in the search results and whether to include community content from those help centers. See Multiple help center search and Enabling search across multiple help centers.
If you configure your search settings to let users see search results across multiple help centers, they can select a content tag and view articles from both help centers with that tag. If you don't allow users to see results across both brands, it won’t matter that you’ve tagged all articles with the same tag. Users will still only be able to view articles within the brand they are currently in.
Getting started with content tags
If you have never used content tags before, here are some considerations and possible theme updates to make before you begin.
- (If necessary) Download the latest Copenhagen theme or update your custom theme to enable content tags. Content tags are available by default in standard themes and themes that were customized after October 19, 2022. If your help center was created before October 19, 2022 and uses a customized theme, you need to update your custom theme to use content tags.
- Enable content tagging for your community. By default, content tagging on community posts is disabled, meaning that end users cannot add content tags to their posts. If content tags have been applied to posts or articles, end users will still be able to see and click those tags on published content, but they cannot add them. When content tagging on community posts is enabled, end users can view and apply any content tag in your application to their community post. Before you enable content tags on your community content, make sure that you approve of all community users viewing and using the content tags you define. To allow end users to apply content tags to posts see Allowing users to add content tags to community posts.
- Understand who has permission to create, add, and remove content tags. Guide admins and article authors can create content tags in articles. Only Guide admins and agents can create content tags in community posts.
Best practices for using content tags
The following best practices explain how to make the most out of using content tags to streamline your end user experience:
- Naming - When you write an article or post, try to think about what main ideas, concepts, features, or products it covers. Content tags are intended to simplify search, so when you create a tag, ask yourself if this name can be understood and reused by others. It also helps to use short names. Content tags are case insensitive so if you have a content tag titled “test” then you cannot call a new tag “TEST”.
- Limit content tags: Although it is possible to add up to 25 tags to an article or post, you should only use 5 to 7 content tags. The purpose of content tags is to surface related content across your help center and community. If you place too many content tags on an article or post, it will be cluttered and difficult to use.
- Keep tags current: Review content tags once in a while, look for spelling and grammar mistakes, duplication, and low usage. You can easily fix mistakes by updating the name of a tag. For tags with low usage, it is important to check if a name is meaningful and understood by others. In this case, consider renaming or even removing a content tag.
- Merging content tags: Resolve errors in tag names or remove duplicate tags by merging content tags. For example, if you have two content tags named "content tag" and "content_tag", you can merge the incorrect tag into the correct tag. When you merge a tag, content associated with the merged tag is added to the tag you are merging into. The merged tag is then deleted from your account. See Managing content tags.
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