Meta Format

[Dan Rosenstein]

Is there a document that states best practice for typing meta? This would include when to use commas, underscores for phrases, etc. Basically, how to do meta for a knowledge article out of the box best practices. 

[Henrietta T]

I would like more information as well. Question for the group as my team and I are in the planning phase for serving employee-facing content through ServiceNow (ESC) - are you able to hide the meta information from appearing on articles? Currently, the meta appears on articles for our internal agents. Since the meta keywords aren't clickable or anything, it just takes up real estate and if you were adding phrases multiple times - it could take up the whole page.

[Dan Rosenstein · Accepted solution]

ok, so I think this is the answer: Commas for combined words and single words e.g.: statement of work, statement and quotation marks for sentences e.g.: "How do I update my Outlook profile?"

[Henrietta T]

Is there any documentation that you were able to find?

Do you have meta appearing to the end user on your articles? Or are they hidden?

[John Ingram]

I might be wrong, but I've always interpreted the Meta field as simply a text field that doesn't display on the article view, but the contents of which are indexed for search. Everything you put in the field is indexed by the search engine, regardless of the formatting.

The anecdotal testing we've done hasn't resulted in any notable difference in results when using commas or not using commas. So, to use the author's example, an article with the phrase "statement of work" in the Meta field would return in searches for "statement" or "work". Adding "statement" as a separate keyword provided no improvement in search ranking.

[OwenB]

We are using Paris but I believe where Zing is used this works.

The Key is to use underscores to tie keywords together in a single phrase. Underscores replacing the spaces will help to tie unique keywords together in a single phrase adding weight to that exact phrase.  Global_Knowledge_Mangement will bump up that article in KB results when someone searches "Global Knowledge Mangement" as compared to searching for "Global", "Knowledge", and "Management" as three separate keywords that may exist separately throughout the article

Also Stack Meta Tags to increase the weight of your terms or phrases and be sure to seperate tags\phrases with commas!

You can repeat your search terms up to three times to add weight to it as shown:

Our teams are seeing great results by avoiding generic words and phrases as this will always give you too many results and by using the phrase tagging with the underscores in place of the spaces between the words in the phrase to tie it together.  Always separate the tags with a comma in the Meta field as above.

This field is not visible to the person viewing the article but remember to check what your consumers are searching for and make sure that is covered in the Meta tags and make them as unique to that article as you can, this is where the phrase tagging can help as its far more specific than single word tags.