Keyword Best Practices for Knowledge Articles

[Wendell Hankins]

Struggling to find a document that gives you the best practices for Keyword/Meta to get the best out of the Knowledge base. Are their different syntax you can use the keyword/Meta box. Should you repeat words or do repeated words hurt your search results. 

[Alberto Consonn]

HI @Wendell Hankins 

Below the general best practices:

Adding keywords

An article's keywords field should include all the relevant terms your user might try to find your article. 

Put yourself in the user's shoes. How would they describe the task they're trying to complete? What words do they use when talking about this topic? The language you use to describe your service could be very different than the language your customer uses, so remember to include both terms in the keywords.

• Separate terms using commas (e.g. search, SEO, keywords)
• Separate words in the same phrase using underscores (e.g. how_do_I_edit_knowledge_keywords, improve_knowledge_search)
• Avoid generic terms that will pull up too many results. If all authors add the keyword "article" to every KB, it becomes meaningless.
• List questions users might have that could be answered by this article. This greatly reduces the number of FAQ articles you need, while providing a better user experience. 
  • Remember to include different variations of the same questions and phrases (e.g. "How do I edit a knowledge article" and "How to edit a knowledge article" and "How do you edit a knowledge article" and "how to edit a KB") Each question should be included.
• Repeat keywords up to three times to boost relevancy.

I would also recommend to use the following blog as guideline for metadata:

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=9acc6265dbd0dbc01dcaf3231f9619ef

At the below thread, some helpful information about the difference between keyword and metadata:

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=cb62cbeddb98dbc01dcaf3231f96...

That's it! Hope this will clarify your doubts.

If I have answered your question, please mark my response as correct and helpful so that this thread can be closed and others can be benefited by this.

Thank you very much

Cheers
Alberto

[Eva3]

Hi Alberto,

is this article and guidelines still valid?

Best,

Eva

[Wendell Hankins]

Thank You For the Wealth of Information!!!

[Alberto Consonn]

@Wendell Hankins 

Did this solve your question? Or do we need to follow-up on this?

If I have answered your question, please mark my response as correct so that others with the same question in the future can find it quickly and that it gets removed from the unanswered list.

Thank you very much

Cheers
Alberto