Tags vs Meta field

[jeanderson]

Hi! 

We are migrating our current Zendesk Help Center to ServiceNow and I'm hoping to learn more about minimizing the impact on SEO for our content.  I would love any resources the community has connected to setting up ServiceNow knowledge for a customer help center/tips for what we should do to minimize impact. 

Also- I'm wondering what the difference is between Tags that you add from the top of the article (see image) and the Meta field that we can edit?  Are these the same? How are they different? Which should we be using to add keywords for SEO?  I have tried to find information on the difference and have fallen short so far so adding here in hopes someone can point me in a helpful direction. Thank you!

[Dr Atul G- LNG · Accepted solution]

Hi @jeanderson 

I'm wondering what the difference is between Tags that you add from the top of the article (see image) and the Meta field that we can edit? Are these the same? How are they different?

Atul:  Yes, we can edit both as per the requirements. Tags, as the name suggests, are used to categorize and filter content, while the meta field helps improve search functionality by allowing the addition of synonyms or related terms that can be used in searches.

 Which should we be using to add keywords for SEO? 

Atul: Use Meta field for SEO.

I have tried to find information on the difference and have fallen short so far so adding here in hopes someone can point me in a helpful direction. Thank you!

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @andreababch 

No tags are for internal users not for end users, so you cant use the same on the portal.

[paulclement]

Tags can be used on the portal. The Tags widget was available in our Knowledge Portal, which was OOTB, so we added it to our Service Portal.

[John_Wilkes · Accepted solution]

On face value tags and meta look like they do the same things in different ways and if you have a small knowledge base without various permission levels it probably wouldn't matter which on you used.

However if you have different permission levels for various knowledge bases and tags with specific permissions then tags could become a headache to use.

I would use meta to tag your articles with terms not contained in your article (such as old names or non-official names for items in the articles) 

Tags i would use almost like a post-it note on articles. Its a good way to highlight on reports, specific characteristics of an article that you want to report on but does not have an out of the box field. They can also be useful if you want to ringfence a specific group of articles. I've used this when i'm working with an ownership group that may support multiple products. 

Tags can be great for tracking things without people knowing it. You can set up permissions for specific individuals and anyone else looking at your articles will not see the tag. With meta, everyone will see it.

Be careful though both meta and tags can be found in search, even if the tag is not visible to you. I avoid this by giving my tags a code which is clear to my team what it means but is a term that my users would never consider searching for.

[jeanderson]

Thank you! This is very helpful.  Do you know if using spaces between words works in the Meta field or if we should be using an underscore? For example, if we wanted to add account restriction as a meta field would we use "account restriction," or "account_restriction,"? 

And also assuming we separate the different Meta entries with commas. 

[paulclement]

We've found that using comma separated phrases works best in the Meta field. Having spaces is fine.