Tag Clouds: What are Tag Clouds?

Posted by Pixelhead

Tag Clouds, what the heck are tag clouds you might ask? Well if you look over in the sidebar you will see the tag cloud for this site.

Tag clouds are generally alphabetically ordered lists of tags that make a visual representation of the overall content on a a website. Words or tags that are represented more often on a site are listed with darker and larger text. Since many of my posts are about SEO, the SEO tag is the biggest and darkest.

When writing posts, each post is “tagged” with representative keywords. And the more often a tag is used, the bigger and darker that tag will become in the tag cloud.

Yea, Why Do I care about Tag Clouds?

If you click on the SEO Training tag, you will be brought to a page that contains nothing but posts that have been tagged with the “SEO Training” tag. Each tag will produce a new page. I would also suggest that each tag page should have:

A unique title(mine don’t, need to fix that)
Contain only post excerpts, not entire posts.

Check out Wayne’s Website Marketing TAG page for an example of a good tag page.

*often times, tag pages show up very high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) because they are usually a good representation of the keyword.

More TAG Do’s and Don’ts

Do a bit of keyword research, and tag your blog post with the most relevant keywords which gets the most searches.
Don’t use unrelated tags just because they get a lot of searches.
If your blog editor does not allow you to put in tags automatically you can use the code like<a rel=”tag” href=”http://www.pixelheadonline.com/blog/tag/seo-tips/”>SEO tips</a>, replacing my info with yours.
Use both Tags and categories to organize your blog. Categories can be more general, where tags can be more keyword specific. Using Tags helps to reduce the number of categories of your blog posts. (I have way to many categories)

Some Tag Cloud Resources

WordPress Tag Cloud Pluggins
I use the New Tag Cloud Pluggin
Got any tag resources to add?

Do you use tag clouds? What is your experience or lack of experience with tag clouds?

tags: SEO tips,SEO,tag cloud,tag clouds

Written by Pixelhead on November 12th, 2009 with comments disabled.
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34 comments

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Paula Jo
#1. November 12th, 2009, at 9:55 PM.

You taught me something I didn’t know yet how that works and what those tag clouds are for. I don’t own a blog myself and I’m fairly new to pretty much everything about webdesign and or blogs but have seen those tag clouds occasionally while surfing the web and was always wondering if it is just a design idea. Thanks for the lesson. I will surely use cloud tags for my own blog someday.
(I have read your commentators guidelines and even I don’t owe an own blog yet I wanted to say Thank you)

Adolescent Residential Treatment
#2. November 13th, 2009, at 12:20 AM.

Is there another style that could be used as tag clouds?
Thank you for sharing this I never thought how important the tag cloud is. I thought it was only a design on the homepage of the site and I’m not much particular on the keyword research but on what you share now I know how to use tag clouds.

SEO wizz
#3. November 13th, 2009, at 12:19 PM.

I have to be honest I have never really seen any direct ‘SEO’ benefits from using tag clouds. Also Google have now declared that repetative anchor links to internal pages may be devalued.

chandan@work at home
#4. November 14th, 2009, at 6:56 AM.

Hi Pixell head, yes tag cloud are important for us. We can use tag cloud as label of the blog post. Most of social bookmarking site like digg also use tag cloud.

cbreceipt
#5. November 15th, 2009, at 4:52 AM.

I prefer using a few labels/tags instead of having a gazillion of them. After all a lot of tags don’t make navigating easier. Or is it just me?

bestpricemoving
#6. November 16th, 2009, at 10:29 AM.

At first i just want to say you thanks. Because you share with us. Actually I didn’t know tag is very important for us. I have never use it before. But I will use it from now on. thanks for the tips.

Jayesh SEO Mumbai
#7. November 16th, 2009, at 11:29 AM.

Hi
Yes i can say from my experience that tag clouds are still very important

sportytrader
#8. November 16th, 2009, at 3:09 PM.

Thanks for the information, I didn’t know about the importance of tags. I was always asking myself, why the tags have a different size. But I don’t like sites which only have tags and no categories, it’s hard to find something when your searched keyword is not in the tag cloud.

Kim Ramsey
#9. November 16th, 2009, at 3:58 PM.

Tagging plays an important role in an owner’s site. It actually helps the owners to get relevant results with the use of their post where they provided a tag. Many take advantage of this technique.

Equipment Leasing
#10. November 16th, 2009, at 6:47 PM.

Too many categories… I know that problem well! I really need to go through and re-organize my tags and categories on a few blogs I operate. I am going to try and limit my categories to about 10 areas, using tags to help further group my articles.

FYI… Deep linking to tag/category pages has been a big help in ranking for more specific keywords!

Pixelhead
#11. November 17th, 2009, at 3:44 PM.

Just a side note, I was checking out the refering traffic for this post, and Technorati sent some traffic for the phrase “tag cloud”..I wonder how much traffic they would send if I used “Technorati tags”?

Pixelhead
#12. November 17th, 2009, at 3:47 PM.

Paula, thanks for reading the guidelines and leaving a great, relevant comment. Many times I delete comments that don’t have an associated blog at the very least.

Paula Jo
#13. November 17th, 2009, at 7:10 PM.

Pixelhead, you are very welcome and I thank you for not deleting my comment. I appreciate very much any blog, any forum post or any article I can learn something new from, and I will leave a relevant comment. For me being honest, I do not like people they just post something like “great post” or “nice post” etc. just to get the chance for a quick and easy backlink. And also thanks to you for coming and check out my shop. I will keep coming back to your blog and if I find something interesting you will have to expect me commenting on it.

faydaliweb
#14. November 18th, 2009, at 1:40 PM.

you can use category tag cloud with standart tag cloud

Goran | Net Age
#15. November 19th, 2009, at 9:58 AM.

You raise some good points about tag cloud pages. Be very careful of duplicate content, so rather just use an excerpt with a link back to the page where the original post can be found. Unique titles are also a must. Always remember that duplicate content is your great enemy, and will do your SEO efforts no favours.

New Homes
#16. November 20th, 2009, at 8:19 PM.

I use tag clouds on every page of my website because we have built it in wordpress. I think that they help identify what your page is and about. Not sure if it a huge factor but I think every little bit helps in the eye of Google.

crazy blogger
#17. November 21st, 2009, at 10:28 AM.

use good keywords in tags can attract more traffic from search engines

Change of Address
#18. November 22nd, 2009, at 8:40 PM.

Thanks very much for the list of resources on the tag cloud, especially the WordPress plugin. Now I’ll have something to add to my to-do list of things that should be updated on my own blogs.

Harry
#19. November 24th, 2009, at 6:16 AM.

Great post shows important of tag clouds. Thanks for sharing and it was much useful to me.

Javier Martinez
#20. November 24th, 2009, at 12:03 PM.

I’ve read several comments, some for and others against the cloud of tags. Can anyone explain me if it can improve my position in Google?

Ben Hunt (web designer)
#21. November 26th, 2009, at 12:53 PM.

I find most tag clouds to be “more funk than function”.

I get the idea, but the application is more often than not inappropriate.

Shoaib
#22. November 26th, 2009, at 2:25 PM.

Tag cloud is an emerging feature and a number of websites are adopting it. A website with a tag cloud can help their visitors know about their focus. So, overall I think its a good feature.

dadiss
#23. November 26th, 2009, at 8:11 PM.

yep , useful stuff here , even if tag cloud are a bit confusing for all those who do not know how to use them to find the topic they are looking for , thanks

Link building
#24. November 28th, 2009, at 6:56 PM.

There is a great advantage with tag clouds. Lets say if you have an article regarding seo then you will be using some keywords like seo,search engine optimization, sem. So each tag cloud will have some dedicated pages.
example : domain.com/article/tag/seo

So, this will increases number of indexed pages of your site. Site authority increases as number of indexed pages increases… And ofcourse many people build links to tags.. This is also a great benefit.

Keith @ Superior Fence Products
#25. December 4th, 2009, at 2:35 PM.

So many get confused on the use not only of tags, but especially categories. I used to confuse the 2 so much that I would have the same keywords for both! Good article.

Pixelhead
#26. December 4th, 2009, at 3:56 PM.

yea, I agree totally. As you can tell by my sidebar, I have way too many categories on this blog..but its a little late now.

Antony
#27. December 8th, 2009, at 4:14 PM.

thanks for the info about words or tags that are represented more often on a site are listed with darker and larger text, I thought that the size is randomly created..

gunceldurum
#28. December 10th, 2009, at 1:49 AM.

Susan
#29. December 15th, 2009, at 9:31 AM.

Interesting article and although i have never used them i can see certain advantages. Your tag cloud looks smart and is compact and if it works saves the effort of writing a lot of content to get the required keywords onto the page. I will certainly give it a try on a couple of pages and if can notice any perveived improvements will certainly add then here. Fingers crossed i do.

SEO
#30. January 29th, 2010, at 12:23 PM.

Depends how its written but each tag should be weighted as a % of the corpus, so there should always be room.Alternatively if you have a very dispersed corpus you can limit the cloud to the top N% tags.

Wayne John
#31. February 18th, 2010, at 11:10 PM.

I just found out that you linked to one of my pages, and I never caught it when you actually did it. Thanks for the link love Adam!

Tag are perhaps the best way to increase your overall page count too. For each tag you add, that’s yet another page in your collection of pages that comprise your blog.

More pages = more traffic potential = more potential search revenue

Daddy like!

technology
#32. July 12th, 2010, at 2:08 PM.

zekatesti
#33. July 14th, 2010, at 9:17 PM.

I just found out that you linked to one of my pages, and I never caught it when you actually did it. Thanks for the link love Adam!

Tag are perhaps the best way to increase your overall page count too. For each tag you add, that’s yet another page in your collection of pages that comprise your blog.

More pages = more traffic potential = more potential search revenue

Daddy like!

SEO Outsourcing Services
#34. July 30th, 2010, at 11:01 AM.

i think you dont have to categarize things more deeply, all the post related to seo should go under SEO tag, it is very difficult for guest to fine things….